Smarter Than I Am

My thick insentient palms have heels, unwieldy pads
of flesh, which glide and rest and press – reside
like mollusks – stupid muscle – on the smooth divided
deck of my new laptop: how did Hewlett-Packard
do it? – make this metal feel like sin – all satin, warm
and sensual? – not only can the Word transmute
to skin and body, so can steel: nothing is impossible
for this adept: eventually everything, through it, will be
revealed. I suppose Johann Sebastian Bach may

well have stopped a second to regard with some
affection his besotted quill through which he day-to-day
spilled his unending amplitudes of music: no doubt
Henry James, whose carpal tunnel syndrome made
him lame, rejoiced occasionally in the clicky-clack
of his amanuenses ticking on the typewriter to capture
his effluvially oral flows; and surely no man knows
or knew more than Van Gogh the spunk and plunk
of brushes and the rush that merely contemplating

implements, at moments, can bestow – though
one can’t not think that they got right back to business,
let the physics of the art’s logistics quite alone. But oh! –
today, I am more clam than man: not only can’t
I summon up a molecule of what the Messrs. Bach,
Van Gogh and James could, or (who knows) still
somewhere in the cosmos can – I’m less than
this flat brilliant metal cyber-cake hot from the Hewlett-
Packard pan. My instrument is smarter than I am.

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