When I told Marina I liked her new striped tunic
but there was a hole in her armpit, under her sleeve,
I thought I was making a generous, helpful gesture,
an appropriate social move.
That was the year when we studied the Great Depression,
the business cycle, and macroeconomics.
Companies grew by meeting familiar demands,
or else by spreading news about new pleasures.
I wanted programmable gloves that could make you bionic,
whose workings I laid out in series, in graph-paper pictures;
I diagrammed volts and resistors, tongue-and-groove,
the difference between graphic novels and newspaper comics,
also a parallelogram-based function for love.
I gave a whole series of ten-minute lunchtime lectures
about linguistics to playground structures. “Steve,”
my favorite teacher told me, “you’ll probably use
those theories someday and your future colleagues will thank
you for all of them, but we’d like you to think
about what might be interesting to your friends,
not just about what’s interesting to you.”