by Joan E. Bauer
After the fire, we wanted comedy, for some crazy reason: Woody in Sleeper as the hapless nerd, frozen (in aluminum foil) to awaken in 2173: the silver-headed robot, the Orgasmatron, all the loopy sight gags. Night after night, we’d laugh, then lie awake listening to the midnight trains rattling: engine, box cars, hoppers. Years later, roaming the net I find, for upscale paranoids: a “sleeper security bed” the ultimate in protection from hurricane, tornado, flood & bio-chem attack. Bed as safe-room: metal re-enforced, with CD, microwave, short wave—think I made this up? Fish called sleepers, four-eyed, stripe-cheeked, duck-billed, recede into the burrows & crevices& coral reefs or simply die because they have no—What is a pelvic sucker? Maybe the whole country should go ice fishing—hunker down in sleepers look for pike & muskie & jumbo perch. Not that we want the fish—but solitude, no phone, no pager. Propane & poles & a chance to wear heavy coats & funny fur hats. Long ago building wooden bridges took strong supporting beams, transverse planks. Sleepers: strong timber, like the sleepers of a ship, the valley rafters of a roof—what’s unseen, yet holds. They call Africa the “sleeping” continent & why shouldn’t they be sleeping: refuge from war & hunger & disease, yet the folks in Chad, Uganda, even Kenya will tell you—they’re heading toward a better world. We’re like that, aren’t we—wanting to believe. Even if we’re just the framing timber: sleepers on the rails.
Joan E. Bauer grew up in Los Angeles, where she taught English and journalism at public and independent schools. She currently works as an educational counsellor in Pittsburgh. Her poetry has appeared in The Comstock Review, Main Street Rag, and Quarterly West. She is co-editor of Only the Sea Keeps: Poetry of the Tsunami (Bayeux Arts, 2005). Her poetry manuscript, The Almost Sound of Drowning, was a finalist in the 2006 Autumn House Competition.