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Exquisite Corpse - A Journal of Letters and Life
Poesy
Excerpt from Einstein Alive
by Neeli Cherkovski
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2


It can't be forced
none of this stuff, it's about rooms
rooms, crazy people, locked up people
people having the stuffing beat out of them
I don't mean to make light light
my neighbors are quite out of hand
put my name in the book
music and dead darkness
a unified field, a montage, a rerun of
images, a slapdash recording of sound
and sight?
Help me feel complete

Albert Einstein regarded the ether
as superfluous, but up until then the ether
was like Sinai, you can wander
for eternity, but he came up with the idea
of space, of empty space, of man, of light, light
will propagate through empty space

it's difficult enough to reach for ether
when only light is in your grasp
what does it mean
to be a witness anyway?
I suppose you mean to stand there
in the century

energy, Coyote
they want energy
a man of physics
a pianist, not an asshole
not you, Sweeney

we dream of energy
not spread out over a field
localized, made insignificant
in the end, I propose
for example not to be concerned
over an entire continent's pain

I have enough trouble
standing on meaning alone
or being without it, utterly

I felt lost, o so lost

I called to speak
to Mister Einstein
but he was in another
century eating electricity
and making love
to a music
he alone could hear

Below me were the Alps
above me the ceiling
of the plane, in front
a bald man's scalp
below me the floor
in back a head rest,
beside me Albert Einstein
snoring

that old Twentieth Century Fox
stalking its prey

how I feel about love,
you can only imagine
what poetry means to me
who never took his shoes off
long enough to pray
to one blast of energy

born to suffer
outside of outside

to be a footnote
in someone else's song

Albert Einstein looked
like Gertrude Stein
I guess everyone looks
like everyone else
funny poets
write funny poems
but those of us
who simply weave
must be content

February rain knocks
on our door, I looked on a deluge
and saw Einstein walking
with my neighbor

     relentless rain

how strange to think
we are never going to die
the cycles will repeat, we are
built of these things, light
and what surrounds us, corridors
through the antithesis of time


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