Einstein

Standing between the sun and moon preserves

A certain secrecy. Or seems to keep

Something inviolate if only that

His father was an ape.

Sweet music makes

All of his walls sound hollow and he hears

Sighs in the paneling and underfoot

Melancholy voices. So there is a door

Behind the seamless arras and within

A living something:— but no door that will

Admit the sunlight nor no windows where

The mirror moon can penetrate his bones

With cold deflection. He is small and tight

And solidly contracted into space

Opaque and perpendicular which blots

Earth with its shadow. And he terminates

In shoes which bearing up against the sphere

Attract his concentration,       (Einstein upon a public bench Wednesday the ninth contemplates finity)

for he ends

If there why then no farther, as, beyond

Extensively the universe itself,

Or chronologically the two dates

Original and ultimate of time,

Nor could Jehovah and the million stars

Staring within their solitudes of light,

Nor all night's constellations be contained

Between his boundaries,

nor could the sun

Receive him nor his groping roots run down

Into the loam and steaming sink of time

Where coils the middle serpent and the ooze

Breeds maggots.

But it seems assured he ends

Precisely at his shoes in proof whereof

He can revolve in orbits opposite

The orbit of the earth and so refuse

All planetary converse. And he wears

Cloths that distinguish him from what is not

His own circumference, as first a coat

Shaped to his back or modeled in reverse

Of the surrounding cosmos and below

Trousers preserving his detachment from

The revolutions of the stars.         (Einstein descends the Hartmannsweilerstrasse)

His hands

And face go naked and alone converse

With what encloses him, as rough and smooth

And sound and silence and the intervals

Of rippling ether and the swarming motes

Clouding a privy: move to them and make

Shadows that mirror them within his skull

In perpendiculars and curves and planes

And bodiless significances blurred

As figures undersea and images

Patterned from eddies of the air.

Which are

Perhaps not shadows but the thing itself

And may be understood. (Einstein provisionally before

a mirror accepts the hypothesis of subjective reality)

Decorticate

The petals of the enfolding world and leave

A world in reason which is in himself

And has his own dimensions. Here do trees

Adorn the hillside and hillsides enrich

The hazy marches of the sky and skies

Kindle and char to ashes in the wind,

And winds blow toward him from the verge, and suns

Rise on his dawn and on his dusk go down

And moons prolong his shadow. And he moves

Here as within a garden in a close

And where he moves the bubble of the world

Takes center and there circle round his head

Like golden flies in summer the gold stars.

...rejects it

Disintegrates.

For suddenly he feels

The planet plunge beneath him, and a flare

Falls from the upper darkness to the dark

And awful shadows loom across the sky

That have no life from him and suns go out

And livid as a drowned man's face the moon

Floats to the lapsing surface of the night

And sinks discolored under.

So he knows

Less than a world and must communicate

Beyond his knowledge. (Einstein unsuccessfully after lunch attempts to enter, essaying synthesis with what's not he, the Bernese Oberland)

Outstretched on the earth

He plunges both his arms into the swirl

Of what surrounds him but the yielding grass

Excludes his finger tips and the soft soil

Will not endure confusion with his hands

Nor will the air receive him nor the light

Dissolve their difference but recoiling turns

Back from his touch. By which denial he can

Crawl on the earth and sense the opposing sun

But not make answer to them.

      Put out leaves

And let the old remembering wind think through

A green intelligence or under sea

Float out long filaments of amber in

The numb and wordless revery of tides.

In autumn the black branches dripping rain

Bruise his uncovered bones and in the spring

His swollen tips are gorged with aching blood

That bursts the laurel.

But although they seize

His sense he has no name for them, no word

To give them meaning and no utterance

For what they say. Feel the new summer's sun

Crawl up the warmed relaxing hide of earth

And weep for his lost youth, his childhood home

And a wide water on an inland shore!

Or to the night's mute asking in the blood

Give back a girl's name and three notes together!

He cannot think the smell of after rain

Nor close his thought around the long smooth lag

And falter of a wind, nor bring to mind

Dusk and the whippoorwill.   (Einstein dissolved in violins invades the molecular structure of F. P. Paepke's Sommergarten. Is repulsed)

      But violins

Split out of trees and strung to tone can sing

Strange nameless words that image to the ear

What has no waiting image in the brain.

She plays in darkness and the droning wood

Dissolves to reverberations of a world

Beating in waves against him till his sense

Trembles to rhythm and his naked brain

Feels without utterance in form the flesh

Of dumb and incommunicable earth,

And knows at once, and without knowledge how,

The stroke of the blunt rain, and blind receives

The sun.

When he a moment occupies

The hollow of himself and like an air

Pervades all other.

  But the violin

Presses its dry insistence through the dream

That swims above it, shivering its speech

Back to a rhythm that becomes again

Music and vaguely ravels into sound.

(To Einstein asking at the gate of stone none opens)

So then there is no speech that can resolve

Their texture to clear thought and enter them.

The Virgin of Chartres whose bleaching bones still wear

The sapphires of her glory knew a word—

That now is three round letters like the three

Round empty staring punctures in a skull.

And there were words in Rome once and one time

Words at Eleusis.

Now there are no words

Nor names to name them and they will not speak

But grope against his groping touch and throw

The long unmeaning shadows of themselves

Across his shadow and resist his sense.

    (Einstein hearing behind the wall of the Grand Hotel du Nord the stars discovers the Back Stair)

Why then if they resist destroy them. Dumb

Yet speak them in their elements. Whole,

Break them to reason.

He lies upon his bed

Exerting on Arcturus and the moon

Forces proportional inversely to

The squares of their remoteness and conceives

The universe.

Atomic.

He can count

Ocean in atoms and weigh out the air

In multiples of one and subdivide

Light to its numbers.

If they will not speak

Let them be silent in their particles.

Let them be dead and he will lie among

Their dust and cipher them—undo the signs

Of their unreal identities and free

The pure and single factor of all sums—

Solve them to unity.

Democritus

Scooped handfuls out of stones and like the sea

Let earth run through his fingers. Well, he too,

He can achieve obliquity and learn

The cold distortion of the winter's sun

That breaks the surfaces of summer.

(Einstein on the terrasse of The Acacias forces the secret door)

  Stands

Facing the world upon a windy slope

And with his mind relaxes the stiff forms

Of all he sees until the heavy hills

Impend like rushing water and the earth

Hangs on the steep and momentary crest

Of overflowing ruin.

Overflow!

Sweep over into movement and dissolve

All differences in the indifferent flux!

Crumble to eddyings of dust and drown

In change the thing that changes!

There begins

A vague unquiet in the fallow ground,

A seething in the grass, a bubbling swirl

Over the surface of the fields that spreads

Around him gathering until the green

Boils and under frothy loam the rocks

Ferment and simmer and like thinning smoke

The trees melt into nothing.

Still he stands

Watching the vortex widen and involve

In swirling dissolution the whole earth

And circle through the skies till swaying time

Collapses crumpling into dark the stars

And motion ceases and the sifting world

Opens beneath.

When he shall feel infuse

His flesh with the rent body of all else

And spin within his opening brain the motes

Of suns and worlds and spaces.

(Einstein enters like a foam)

His flesh is withered and his shriveling

And ashy bones are scattered on the dark.

But still the dark denies him. Still withstands

The dust his penetration and flings back

Himself to answer him.

            Which seems to keep

Something inviolate. A living something.