she pulls them to her.
I sit, take out my own book—Cioran, The Temptation to Exist—and notice her glancing
up from hers
to take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she “affirms
herself physically,” that is,
becomes present in a way she hadn’t been before: though she hasn’t moved, she’s
allowed herself
to come more sharply into focus, be more accessible to my sensual perception, so I
can’t help but remark
her strong figure and very tan skin—(how literally golden young women can look at
the end of summer.)
She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn’t pull it away;
she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms,
sensitive, alive,
achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus
acknowledged, known.
I understand that in no way is she offering more than this, and in truth I have no
desire for more,
but it’s still enough for me to be taken by a surge, first of warmth then of something
like its opposite:
a memory—a girl I’d mooned for from afar, across the table from me in the library in
school now,
our feet I thought touching, touching even again, and then, with all I craved that touch
to mean,
my having to realize it wasn’t her flesh my flesh for that gleaming time had pressed,
but a table leg.
The young woman today removes her arm now, stands, swaying against the lurch of
the slowing train,
and crossing before me brushes my knee and does that thing again, asserts her bodily
being again,
(Gombrowicz again), then quickly moves to the door of the car and descends, not once
looking back,
(to my relief not looking back), and I allow myself the thought that though I must be to
her again
as senseless as that table of my youth, as wooden, as unfeeling, perhaps there was a
moment I was not.
