Brief Encounters with Famous Men by Kimberly Andrews

*

Because I don’t believe in memoirs and because I was never 

the kind of precocious young person who is the sort of person who

grows up to become a writer, having kept meticulous and idiosyncratic

records of their own lives and reading and thoughts, I never wrote down

the exact story of how I wound up having a job for a short period

of time in college wherein I would read to an emeritus professor

who had gone blind. I would arrive at his Baltimore apartment 

and I would take my shoes off and I would move across the light

parquet flooring and I would check to make sure everything 

in the galley kitchen seemed to be more or less okay, this was not

in the job description but I felt the need to do it in any case, 

and I would read to him, I don’t now even remember which books,

I do remember that they weren’t novels, that I would have to slow

down often, that I did not understand what I was reading because

when I read aloud I do not process what I am reading despite what

people tend to say about reading aloud. The light would come in 

on my left side. 
		
                           I was, I think, reading either literary criticism or

philosophy, I keep wanting to say Kirkegaard but I think that’s just

because my name starts with K, K for Kim and for Klimt and for 

Kirkegaard. Or maybe it was something about Romantic poetry and

my last apartment at college had a sunroom that looked over some kind

of well-manicured garden, my roommate and I paid too much for it and

painted the walls an absolutely absurd shade of bright green, I mean 

truly Nickelodeon Slime(TM) green, and we painted the trim

purple and when I moved out early to follow some guy out West

she had to deal with the landlord. She never forgave me for that 

or for the guy and that’s correct and I do not deserve to be forgiven.

The emeritus professor looked like an emeritus professor and I read

to him out of his books for several months before not reading 

to him anymore, no I don’t remember why I quit or even if I quit

officially or just left for the summer, I have a habit of doing that, of

leaving loose ends, I am terrified of closure, I let my boss at a river

guide company call me every weekend to ask if I was available

when I was three states away, I deleted endless voicemails from 

the scammy modeling agency that had my headshots and had

casting calls in New York, I have never said a single goodbye, 

instead I write maudlin and slightly apologetic letters and leave them

on desks or sometimes on my phone. 
				                        	I once turned down 

an opportunity to drive Harold Bloom to his various appointments.

“Driving Professor Bloom” would have been the joke title 

of the inevitable long essay, it would have been self-aware and 

literary and maybe it would have been published in The Atlantic. 

I did not turn down the opportunity to spend a week in Boothbay

Harbor with Marie Borroff, who warmed scallops in a pan 

and had me walk with her through the botanical gardens. When 

I say she read to me, a long chunk of Beowulf and some other 

Anglo-Saxon texts, I am neither making it up nor trying to redeem

myself, I could have done this yearly but I only did it once, 

I had other things to do, she died several years later and of course

I had regrets, she had arranged to leave the house to good friends

of hers, like sisters, she had a sister, they were both wildly 

ambitious and childless, I am childless and ambitious but not

wildly, I will never amount to much, sometimes I think of the other

student to whom Marie trusted her yearly settling-in, also

a poet, a better one, intensely private, she kept an enormous 

dictionary open on a pedestal stand in the corner of her apartment, 

again, I am not idiosyncratic in these particular ways, she was 

kind but did not have time for me and kept some other life

recorded in an enormous yet somehow also sparse tattoo 

on her back which remained covered up nearly one hundred percent of the time. 

*

Back in the day my father bought and kept volumes 

of the smartest comics—Doonesbury, Calvin and Hobbes—

and so I was aware of the problems and pressures of newspaper syndication 

by the time I was about ten, but when I didn’t need to be read to anymore, 

followed by my sister, my father simply stopped reading altogether.

Now I am driving Harold Bloom to his various appointments,

except I am my father, and Harold Bloom is my mother. No one

is reading to pass the time anymore, I am drinking bitter mint

tea because I never take the bag out of the mug, between here

and home is a straight and well-maintained road, drowned trees,

infinite crenellations into which I notch arrow after arrow, a long

dock stretching straight out into a body of water obscured 

by the grayness of water and the grayness of pines, when something

bled into my mother’s spine I was just beginning to convince the state

of Maine to come to terms with me, I think I was winning, I said 

look you and I are both made of hemlock, of suffering freshets and 

brief summers the color of an ancient piece of paper, plus also 

you’re holding me now anyway as my mother slowly disintegrates

into whatever you become when you become a shell of yourself, 

so maybe this is another way in which I can legitimately say yes, 

I’m half-something. 
			          It is neither surprising nor interesting that I 

have developed some kind of ongoing ache in my neck. I add it 

to my growing repository of pains which according to 

the general sense on the internet are entirely within the standard

bounds of becoming middle aged, no one however alerted me 

to the fact that this would mean that each day I have 

approximately two to three hours during which I can forget

about my body, during which it is not an animal at all, soft

or otherwise, sorry Mary Oliver, I do think that people joke about 

that poem because haha what would it be like to encounter

your own physicality on terms other than bristling antagonism, 

no one knows, my mother’s pain makes her stupid, vacant, women

are called cows because we are constantly swallowing air, 

ruminating on nothing, growing sick and taut with it, “a cold

wind,” it took half a day to stitch her back back together, “dura,” 

the modern conception of sadness is only slightly more interesting

than the fuzzy constant of corporeal deterioration, I am reaching

for something, the something is not there, then suddenly everything

is parents, or mice in a box, sugar and shocks, we have removed

the sky from the equation and we put it back in the form of “the

depressed’s denial of the signifier.” 

				                           I do, I want to say, have

objects. I can’t tell if that’s good or bad, ordered or disordered,

there’s the howling cavern directly in front of me at all times of course

but at the periphery, a bounty, a flickering halo of small pink petals,

Baltimore and a smell of camphor, a meadow, a road, and always

the dock nosing its way out into the lake. There are worse things, 

of course, I have alluded to several of these, how do you learn 

to make metaphors, I am often asked, well you must practice 

enormity, those parasitic wasps that make ants climb up and up 

and up, I don’t think they’re beautiful, in fact I don’t think they mean

anything at all, nevertheless one must, I say this while drawing 

circles on the board, splitting them in half, one must feel as if 

one has no choice but to sculpt these heavy assemblages, heavy

machinery, where once I quit jobs by ghosting now I am a fixture,

solid with a girl inside me who does dream of events to come,

who does dream of the things that were, those amber pebbles

holding the body, the village, the dock, the lake, the father, 

the mother, the poem, the column.  






*the quote "the depressed's denial of the signifier" comes from Julia Kristeva's Black Sun.

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews is an American poet and literary critic. She is the author of A Brief History of Fruit, winner of the Akron Prize for poetry, and BETWEEN, winner of the New Women’s Voices award. She teaches English and creative writing at the University of Ottawa. 

16 February 2026