Einstein was wrong / Hello, Savings and Loan! - 2 poems on a theme

Einstein was wrong

Say two photons of meet in some
Interdimensional, space/time
continuum cocktail lounge.
They banter, clink glasses,
Swap email addresses.
They scribble on sambuca-
stained napkins.
They laugh with no irony.
They don’t miss a beat.
It’s effortless, somehow.

Eventually, of course,
they must go.

With impossible speed—
faster than judgment, faster than thought,
faster than time, they burst
out and spin, photo-negative:
One, counter-clockwise,
The other, like a clock.


Photon A travels north, where
Ice speckles the sea.
Photon B travels south, where
clouds pattern the skies
with bright, watery waves.
They are light years apart, now.

No physical connection passes between them –
no fiberous strings,
no itinerant light beams,
no magical bean-trails,
no postcards, no footprints,
no fun-loving sound waves cruising for
a jazzy old time.

No. They are separate, now.
But they are not alone.

Einstein looks up from his meticulous doodles,
twisting a tooth-bitten pencil in his riotous hair,
Says the word “spooky” aloud, then writes:
“You can not predict the movement of one,
based on the other.”
But Einstein was wrong.

Recalling the other,
With a minion of twinkling
faraway stars now between them –
all across boundaries of space
and of time – they coordinate,
Spinning together. Somehow,they know.


Hello, Savings and Loan!
What if this blade of grass,
with its tender green curve and
sway -- fresh-scented, fleshy,
vibrating with dew --

What if, in a blip,
It would – snap! – disappear?
And your sense of it, too,
vaporized: that memory

gone, splintering the
cycle of shared space and
time, and the world as you’ve
known it, now one ounce

askewed – Would you disappear, too?

Do you, as a part of
the natural world, intersect
with the world and all
that is in it? Yes? Well,
where does this influence end?

At our best, we propel ourselves
like a young Jimmy Stewart –
careening down streets,
wakeful, ebullient,

smattered with soupcons
of snow, flushed with warm
knowledge of this wonderful
life, shouting: “Hello,

movie house! Hello tree!
Hello, Savings and Loan!”

Tasting and touching
immeasurable flosses
that flicker
on delicate winds,

connecting the whole
of the astonishing
world: Connecting it
all to him.