"Intimacy on a Sunday Afternoon" [by Kimberly Steele]

Intimacy on a Sunday Afternoon

After examining all the ways to contemplate
something (like a blueprint, or your leaving)
I spend several minutes discussing my options
with a small bathroom mirror,
beneath which lies a medicine cabinet,
beneath which lies a perfect rectangle
of glossy paint (whiter than the rest)
beneath which lies drywall, termites,
and possibly mold. I mention A. Einstein,
who stole secrets from God and was baffled
by women. I consider the years he spent
learning equations he did not understand,
to prove intuitions that nobody else did.
I cite T. Edison and telephones, B. Gates
and Windows, and how easily I could reach
you now, if you weren’t so hard to touch.
I think about effort and interference,
progress and stasis. And when I have lit
on a strategy — a way to feel knowledge today —
I sit in a comfortable chair someone else
put together, before a writing machine
whose programming I do not understand,
or pull out some paper someone else
manufactured, and reach for a pen
whose ink I am unable to duplicate,
and I give you this.

-- Kimberly Steele

Comments

[Vincent]

To "feel knowledge" is even sweeter than to grasp it in the abstract, as a live model is superior to a photograph. (Therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.)

[Jen]

If we deeply comprehended the things [people] we depend on, perhaps we wouldn't need them so desperately. Puts me a little in the mind of E. Bishop's "the art of losing isn't hard to master," but Steele's narrator is more alienated than coy in the face of what Bishop finally calls "disaster."

[Jen]

"how easily I could reach you now, if you weren’t so hard to touch" . . . Nice turn of phrase . . . the loved one is not only distant but maybe like stone (hard to *the* touch), as impenetrable, in Steele's vision, as the theory of relativity, and as implacable as a PC's blue screen of death!

[R. the Queen]

k. steele: when i need a way to feel knowledge today, i could just read something that you've constructed. both more and less intimate than talking to you in person.