The Sand Hill Review http://www.sandhillreview.org
2005
Einstein &
Ursula: A Sonnet Suite
This series arose recently when I was meditating on the power of illusions, handed down from parent to child, from culture to child, when a child's troubled mind is relatively defenseless; on how illusions can unconsciously direct and shape a life. These sonnets are an attempt to understand for myself something of those effects in my own life; specifically, how my beliefs about the "saving grace" of scientific genius (personified by Einstein as the ultimate exemplar) and the "saving grace" of romantic love (embodied in the woman named here Ursula) imprisoned and misled me even as they awakened me to unsuspected beauty.
—for Anthony Hecht
Preface
There are delusions worth remembering,
And there are the others. All are best left
Post haste. But when love’s at the heart of it,
Every move away seems a move against
That self they brought to life: that deepened you
And breathed you. —Unnatural contrary,
The life-force so cleaved to dream and nightmare,
Yet in our fallen kind a commonplace.
The long trial of aftermath revealed
The falsities: question’s knife was required,
And despair’s, to peel off the fancied selves,
Flay the raw underlayer
down to bone.
And still this habit of stylish language
Lay by death: know I loved them, lie or not.
Einstein
I want to know the mind of God.
—A. Einstein
My belovèd Einstein, you seemed the answer:
That deep intelligence a fortress world.
“Greatest mind on the planet,” people said.
And your face, the laugh of sorrows made wisdom.
And everywhere respect followed your name.
Time, Movietone, how the newsreels loved you.
Your scenes were shot like an old silent movie,—
Always the narrator’s voice, never yours.
Perfect. Perfect. You were perfect. And I
Was their dark child, their shame, their imperfection.
In that little household of stunted lives,
Genius was the Olympian god
They cried out to in the rooms of their midnight,
And I thought if I were you, then their love.
Ursula
Leave me just enough love to hold in my hand…
—Ne Me Quitte Pas,
J. Brel, R. McKuen (transl.)
To write this poem I must feel what
I do not feel. To write this poem I must
Believe again. —Not all of it,
Not even something of what I thought it was;
But what now it is must be invaluable,
Blue sapphire of truth, love’s ruby,
Which believed would mean the past had not
been false.…
Woman, the hand is empty. The past confesses.
It can no longer make this poem,
Nor can the skill of my thought
Or some late flourish of rehashed opinion.
This poem makes nothing,
Because nothing is left, nothing believed,
No thought holds: only memory, worthless
memory.
Wishful Thinking Love
Just say I could not truly imagine it.
For all the ecstasies I constructed
Of perfect lovers, myst’ries,
myself fire.…
No, my stories never had their measure.
But how fabulous were the bedroom scenes,
The passion was a poetry singing,
It sang the endless afternoon to them,
The hours like a river, and silver speech.
And always in these reveries they left.
I could be done without. Always. Come dusk
They’d tell me of their elsewhere lives, kindly
Sometimes, more often that indifference.
There you have it, my dream to dream at will,
And I could imagine nothing more than this.
Elements
of Reality: a Lesson
If, without in
any way disturbing a system,
we can
predict with certainty… the value
of a physical
quantity, then there exists
an element
of physical reality corresponding
to this
physical quantity.
—A. Einstein, B. Podolsky,
& N. Rosen
“Yes, yes, but what is it really?” I asked.
He took several long puffs on his pipe
To signal he was thinking very hard,
Trying out in his mind different words.
This would be the third time through. He would fail;
Only the failure would be mine. I’d leave
His office, my stupidity confirmed,—
(Physics grad student? Christ, who was I
fooling!)…
The “it” was mass—the reality of mass
Is how I would raise the question today.
Then, the new professor from Fermi Lab
Said there wasn’t a problem. I half believed
him.
Mediocrity, in that moment, felled me.
Now I muse on what Einstein might have
countered.
Q.E.D.
I imagined new sonnets like redemption.
Signatures of insight; the salve of wisdom;
My life revalued. I found only error.
I found a person who’d fled every moment,
Yet the memory of failure on failure
Something unshakable in the near distance
And faceless like a shrouded doppelganger,—
One’s familiar as the lie of unknowing.
In the end, Einstein was by his own making
Alone, half discredited. Only time and
The curved space it plays in will reinstate him.
And the woman? she has kept to her secrets;
They have gone with her, into time, the question
Of whom or what she loved rendered eternal.
Afterword
What is missing is what was gained: something
Not them, though “caused” by them. Not loss
exactly,
But what memory carries of absences,
A shaping sight, the wounded world seen true,
Which can pull down one’s vanity. —Some good,
No doubt, to be bettered. But it can ruin,
Hollow out the wilding spirit that made it
And leave the foundered self bereft of fire.
Things were once otherwise, of course. Fool’s
gold,
And not merely youthful folly. Well into
The middle years the vein ran, there to worsen:
Calculus and sonnets and insane love.
When is the fool one was the better part?
—And if in the black deeps, the lesser burn?