Incommensurability

From the back
scrouched down
on my haunches, in my leather
jacket and jeans, this forty year
old woman was mistaken
for a man.

When I was twenty and my breasts
were celebratory and high and
my hair poured light down to my waist,
I read the Critique of Pure Reason,
in which the only possible reader
is a man.

I wanted to be one, sitting there
aware that men in class saw
me, exhibit A, and thought:
she can't read Kant,
her mind won't work
with a priori categories, or care
if abstract space and time match
a living world. Only I seemed
to notice that the rational is not
all that's real.

Feeling my way, I learned
to allude to "the third Critique."
I wrote of the beautiful
and the sublime, my passion
incommensurate
with the coolness of Kant.
Adrian Piper tried another tack:

She snapped pictures in a mirror
of her self in time and space.
Blurred naked images showed
Adrian's a posteriori status
was a sham. As she looked,
she disappeared into a haze
of light, caught in the antinomy
of freedom and the body's necessity.

At twenty, Adrian rode the bus,
a washcloth hanging from her mouth,
straight-faced challenge to the purity
of reason.

She turned forty
with forty minutes of funk, a dancer
back to the camera, sneakers
and jeans, dark hair curled to her hips.

With a sure rhythm, she poses
Kantian questions redefined.
Let me join her:
philosopher,
full of soul, in the flesh.