Love's Resistance
(Crossing the Wheatstone Bridge)

by John Borneman

My last drop of coffee goes down hard,
acrid from sitting untouched
through a damp, cold night.

Sleeping,
you sigh and snuggle down
further into the blankets,
back still turned toward me.

From my nightstand
I remove a bit of quartz
stolen from my lab,
connected
with bits of wire
snaked between
high tolerance resistors,
a transistor,
and a special microprocessor.

I glue a wire to you.
On a bare spot
near the nape of your neck--
one leg of the bridge--
the unknown factor.

I clip a wire to myself.
To a spot shaved on my chest--
just above my heart--
the known factor.

Potential is applied,
from an old car battery
snuck into our room,
while you bathed
and sang about your lover.

In our cold bed
the circuit warms.

you resist, but
as I see from the readouts,
not quite as much as I feared.