The World That Steve’s Hands Built

by Stowe Boyd

I recall my first mac, pushing in
the floppies, and them pushing back out.
It was like a rowing machine, or
kicking a can down the road.

And the modem sound, connecting
to the office or AOL.
Pushing a sound wave off into the ether, and an echo back:
the shape of a looming world,
pinging in the desktop.

Steve Jobs must have been that kid
sitting alone on the back porch,
taking apart his yo-yo and looking, looking
to find where the sleep came from, or
talking to the grease-spotted old men
at the gas station about spark plugs or
what makes trains go so so fast.

Two million years ago, a kid like Steve
debugged fire, chipped flint,
shaped a wheel, and changed
everything. Every last thing.

My sons caught a cascade
of my manhandled Macs,
one by one by one. I handed
Keenan a beat-up fifteen inch
some months ago, with peeling
stickers on the steely case, where
he pours and pulls his fiction. Now,
I live on this teeny tiny macbook air,
as close to me as breathing,
as close as my own fingerprints.

It’s been a tie between us, my
hugely-used laptops in their hands,
off at college, in a library, typing,
typing. Conrad dancing dub step
to Youtube, gaming deep in the night.

A custom now, a way of passing on
the well-handled tools of a booming world,
almost at random: once in a blue moon.
Somehow timed to Apple’s calendar,
but mostly touching ours.

‘You make your tools, and they
shape you’ I read in McLuhan.
Jobs shaped our connections, the way
we touch the tempo and ties of
a strung-together world.

We could draw the graph of Macs passed on
from one to another, out past my sons,
across a sprawling world, out
past a hundred billion hand-offs.
We’d see a net of worn connection,
the world that Steve’s hands built.