Relativity


Einstein’s greatest blunder was some stop-gap measure
to make relativity work —
something about anti-gravity and the space
between the stars. Something necessary
in the equation to prove stasis.

Prove the universe is a static net,
a colossal web wafting in some galactic breeze.
Galaxies, dark holes, super novas, pulsars caught.
He was wrong. And he was right.

Time and space bend beyond the edge of these lined pages,
beyond the toes curled into my brown shoe,
and my small speck of connective tissue
will be nothing more than matter
in a cosmic equation sooner
than the sun runs out of hydrogen, sooner
than the century runs out of years.

Out of chaos, atomic particles gather like minutes
to form morning tea and the quantum mechanics
of all I’ve ever created:
words on this page
words on other pages
volumes on paper, tossed, shredded, kept,
filed, published, and stacked into bookcases.

I’ve planted seeds to become salads,
or ideas to become kids
in a semi-circle writing poetry.

But, can I lift the fifth world from its moorings?
This tippy earth is sick of our footprints.
Underneath, the fourth world
watches our undoing, our unfolding
the nuclear fuels we will use
to exonerate ourselves from history.

Little stars, in our little galaxies,
we are surrounded by dark matter.
Our words will become our gravity,
to bend the universe, or to
follow the next one out of this world.