the porcelain cup is similar to my skull. when i grasp the cup firmly with my hand an arm out of nowhere sprouts on my arm like a graft and the hand on that arm raises the porcelain cup high and hurls it to the wooden floor. since that arm is safeguarding the porcelain cup the thing that is broken into pieces then is my skull that is similar to the porcelain cup. even if my arm had moved before the graft-arm slid into my arm like a snake the white paper that warded off flood would have ripped. yet my arm continues to safeguard the porcelain cup.
Is the governor falling From a great height? Arm in arm we fled the brassiere factory, The motion-boat stayed on the shore! I saw how round its bottom was As you walked into southern France— Upon the light hair of an arm Cigar bands lay!
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,
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