a poem, a feeling

I am always amazed by poets who capture a feeling or a perception with such exact precision that I feel as if I am living it as I read. Here's a poem, for example, that captures a feeling I've experienced, but have never been able to put into words. How many times in my life have I known the electricity of a momentary physical brush with another person? A simple accidental touch doesn't always do it, but there are times when it's like every fiber of one's being gets connected to that momentary and ever so slight contact... do you know what I mean? I remember as far back as 9th grade, sitting next to Diane Fenech in biology class... the assigned seating was two people to a sort of lab table that required us to sit fairly close. I had a terrible overwhelming crush on this girl. From time to time, our forearms would touch or brush, and my entire universe would be centered on that briefest of connections. I spent an entire year trying to get up the nerve to say something to her other than a weak "hi"... it wouldn't have mattered... I was far too self-conscious at the time to sustain any sort of meaningful conversation with a pretty girl. Besides, I think I later found out she was dating a college guy. Maybe not...maybe it's just something I think I remember to reduce the dissonance of not trying to at least interact with her while we dissected a frog together. On the opposite extreme... this, too, is the absolute truth...I once had the experience that this poet writes about in complete reverse... i.e. I thought I was tapping my foot against the leg of a table, and, in fact, unbeknownst to me at that moment, I was playing "footsie" with a guy (and not just any guy, but the very guy whom the people who invited me and others to dinner mentioned to me as having invited a gay friend....yes...who happened to sit next to me at dinner, and, yes, happened to not move his foot at all whilst I played "footsie" with him. Yes, I swear I thought I was tapping one of the table legs. And then...I glanced at him and he slightly smiled at me and then I had this slowly dawning awareness that while we made eye contact, I was also tapping his foot. OK...you get the picture. What does one do in that situation?...I did nothing other than cease and desist my tapping, and spent the rest of the evening avoiding any eye contact or interaction with him and staying as far away from him as the house would allow. I didn't have an issue with him being gay, I just was mortified that I might have sent such a message myself... So I guess the electricity can be positively charged, or positively embarrassing.

Anyway, I love this poem... here it is:


On the Metro

BY C. K. WILLIAMS

On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me;
she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as 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.