Quixotic Perspectives

Climbing a Tree

Bark returns the grip of your hands.
The press of your calves and thighs,
the pull of your arms,
straining through moist heat
let you know you touch a living thing.
The tips of leaves bite – ever so lightly -
your shoulder where it joins bicep and tricep.
It almost tickles.
The joint of a branch becomes a jagged vice
against the sides of your foot
as your weight presses down, resisting your ascent.
Your hand hooks another branch.
Leaves crackle, joining your laughter
when your bicep and latissimus dorsi compress
against the burn of lactic acid,
hauling upward.

Meditating
Meditating on a cliff overlooking ocean surf
Crashing against worn rock
Grains of sand, baby-powder soft, press the sides of my thighs
and calves – air passes between the sand and my knees
My feet rest half-submerged in the giving surface
Water-touched air dances in a breeze over the naked flesh of my body
Face and forehead, chest and shoulders, exposed arms and legs

Delicate chimes join a distant flute whistling an ethereal theme
The air motion stirs the leaves of trees fifty yards at my back
The music is subtle
Yet seeps through me, saturating my soul
Picking me up
Carrying my consciousness off the warmth of the sand into a different comfort.

I am caught by the flute’s music on the warm wind:
Brought down to caress the sturdy rock of the cliff face below my body
Skimming the froth of waves cresting and crashing.
Soaring up, back the way I came
tickled in my ascent by sparse and dry grasses
and beautiful, stiff, green ocean weeds.
Reverberations of stirred wings counterbeat
the soft flutes as I pass over a rising tern
Over the top outcropping of the cliff face, and heated sand above
A brief shudder in passing through my body.
Rushing over, kicking up sand in my wind’s wake
I’m thrown to play among the boughs
and massive trunks of the forest
Up and around – circling, circling
I follow a gray squirrel joyfully
around half a dozen trees
to the speeding whistle of flutes in my mind
Straight up one last tree
Flipping over backwards upon gaining its heights
and diving at the fragrant, dark soil lining the forest floor.

The music quites to a whisper
I pass over turned earth in reverential silence.
I walk into my body to settle home,
This origin of sensual.

Once upon a time, I experimented with my artistic voice. While I still express myself creatively in a variety of ways, I don’t think I’ve exercised my purely artistic voice since I was an undergraduate. What follows is a poem I wrote in that period of shaping my voice.

For little background, it was inspired by watching the movie Altered States starring William Hurt. I believe it was in the 1950’s and 60’s that experiments were conducted with LSD as well as other drugs and sensory deprivation chambers to research altered states of consciousness. I don’t remember the history as well as I once did, but I think the last major experiments with sensory deprivation ended in the very early 1970’s.

So what does this poem have to do with the move or experiments over thirty years old? To be honest, not much. The movie provided inspiration for a jumping-off point. I haven’t participated in sensory deprivation experiments. Alcohol is the only consciousness altering substance I’ve put in my body, and never in quantities sufficient to get more than a slight buzz.

Sensory Deprivation is a mental experiment exploring the juxtaposition of the removal of sensual experience and the heightened emotional and physical sensations that might lead up to it. Did my experimental journey take you anyplace?

Sensory Deprivation

I.
The first thing they do
is claim guardianship of all your clothes.
To your mind
Hands and fingers not your own
Crawl over your nerve endings
Peeling across your chest in tearing tugging shirt tails from pants
Ultimately removing shirt from your shoulders
Hands of a lover
Opening belt clasp, button and zipper behind
Dragging hesitating on the backs of your legs
In drawing heavy denim fabric off sensitized ankles soles toes
Undergarments – twitch twinge
At the unfamiliar clinical hands embracing
Caressing, demanding sexual arousal
Your mind collapses, shuts off invaded.
But the dressing closet remains starkly empty
As you place the last piece atop the mound of your folded garments.
Your stomach churns twists knots below your diaphragm
And your face grows flush, warm
Dragging the leaden weight of your legs,
Tentatively pushing the door to the three-by three closet outward,
You place your clothes in the outstretched hands
Of the white-coated intern assigned to secure them.
Your glazed eyes note movement of the other’s lips, and you nod
But the void echoes in your ears.
The heavy white bathrobe provided on the hook in the closet
Cannot hide your naked flesh
No matter how you wrap it about yourself or draw its belt tight
With the muscles of your arms straining.
II.
Outside the tank
You notice disembodied voices, in hearing again, attempt reassurance
As disembodied hands – light brushes of wind, insect legs felt then not -
Attach patches guiding wires to data in your brain and heart.
A final word from the voices,
And you pivot on the ball of your foot, calf straining.
The two-feet wide circular hole returns your blank stare
And you inhale your last unstructured breath for four hours
When the two sets of hands
Take even the robe from your shoulders
And a third, pressing the small of your back
Guides you to enter feet first the hole in the surgically cold stainless steel.
It doesn’t matter, your head spinning dizzy in shock.

III.
Your feet descend slightly off horizontal.
Your shoulder blades come to rest on a form-fitted hospital mattress.
You fit snug in the hole, the union of mattress and body reaching
Down your spine from the back of your head
Supporting your neck
Following the muscles of your back
And the groove of your spine
Cradling your buttocks, and the backs of your thighs
Wrapping around below your knees, circling your calves
Closing off over the tops of your feet
To the support of your heels curving down from the top in gliding transition.
Several inches above your head, you catch a glimpse of motion
Regal, learned hands and arms -
You sense they belong to a man you saw standing behind the interns
Who attached the patches
But they could just as well belong to the woman you observed next to him.
The thoughts in your mind thrash that you cannot determine with certainty.
With fingertips leading, the hands and arms snake down
To position the wires from the patches in their guide clamps
To secure a heavy padded strap around your upper chest
and arms below your shoulder
To pivot your head precisely
and affix the air-mask over your mouth and nose
To engage the clamp encircling your head
and double check its adjustment.
Satisfied, the arms withdraw.

IV.
The dim illumination reaching you fades
As a submarine hatch closes over your hole.
A soft hiss and thunk
And you know you’re alone.
In an hermetically-sealed void.

V.
You feel your heart rate grow rapid:
The steady increase of power applied to a sewing-machine needle.
You feel it skip when the clamps press
Against your thighs, light pressure an alien comfort
Constricting about your forearms and waist, immobilizing.
You notice again the strap securing your chest
And the clamp around your head.
Your heart once again slower, but now insistent in your ears and throat
The steady beat powerful of a hammer on nail after nail.
Your thoughts a transfixed raccoon, its eyes twin moons in your car lights
Trapped.
Assured immobility – without hope of escape.

The hours of preparation,
Of being told specifically what to expect,
Your mind still withheld acceptance upon experience.

VI.
You imagine your heart stop completely
When you feel the slimy, chill touch of the gelled saline upon your soles.
Until it races again, fast and hard
The rhythmic, hyperactive throbbing of a jackhammer
As you focus your thoughts on the sensation you still have – while they remain.
Your feet have grown numb enshrouded in the gel.
The clamps and strap about your body press against your naked flesh.
cold hardened plastic.
Chill sweat makes the mattress sticky against your back.
The air is a feather-touch breeze tickling naked skin
as it is forced out by the rising saline solution.
Though absent connection, you feel the clinical steel of the chamber walls
press impose upon your chest.
The air you receive from the mask tastes stale, brittle.

VII.
Your heartbeat slows as the gel engulfs your head.
The seconds and minutes pass into nothingness
And sensation follows,
As the liquid is warmed
Merging flesh
With the gel itself
And plastic
And steel
As even the pressure of clamps and strap pass into oblivion.

Awareness of your body removed.
Your mind, your self, ultimately tumbles -
Foundationless.

Today’s New York Times had a couple of interesting companion articles yesterday about poetry online:

Fibonacci Poems Multiply on the Web After Blog’s Invitation,
And It Goes Like This: 0-1-1-2-3-5-8

From the first article

Blogs
spread
gossip
and rumor
But how about a
Rare, geeky form of poetry?

That’s exactly what happened after Gregory K. Pincus, a screenwriter and aspiring children’s book author in Los Angeles, wrote a post on his GottaBook blog (gottabook.blogspot.com) two weeks ago inviting readers to write “Fibs,” six-line poems that used a mathematical progression known as the Fibonacci sequence to dictate the number of syllables in each line.

Though I’m not much into composing haiku poetry myself, their disciplined brevity can be quite beautiful. I may try my hand at the variation “Fibs” offer. In the meantime, over the next few weeks, I’ll share with you a few free verse poems I wrote a number of years ago.