After the accolades, after the party-afters,he sleeps and dreams the pillowed dreamsof all he has accomplished:
The perfectly ordered cosmos. Truth made sentientin the poetry of his geometry. By twenty-six he‘s provedgravity’s no pulling thing as Sir Isaac had said,but a crease in the warp & weft of time.
And while contemplating his navel in a bathtubin a Zurich hotel, predicted the existence of black holes,other forms of unspeakable dark matter.
Before this morning, Relativity reigned aboveall truths because E equaled MC squared everywhere,and even the odd quantum, though spooky, was true.
But now he wakes in a torpor, late for the lab.He wishes he’d never stayed up reading Kafka,or killed that second bottle of wine.
In youth ornate equations had flamed to lifein his brain, like paradoxical fire, like frailparallelograms of light.
But now he can’t recall if quantum mechanicsis an eloquent wave function, or only the localgrease monkeys down at the car repair shop.
He staggers to the bathroom, eyes pulsing redin the mirror as binary stars astraddle the pink nosehis mother so loved. So isosceles, she’d say,so buttery soft. But now the nose, like all his theories,disfigures a face disheveled in doubt.
He sits on the bed, stares at his shoes, and slowly,a great intellectual fracas unfolds in his head:Can he prove the existence of a shoe? Can the truthof a shoe exist without the shoe?
Maddeningly, the shoes are bilateral – a parallaxof a pair of brown brogues.
So he takes a shoebox, puts back the shoesas if they are new, unsoiled by human feet,
And does a thought experiment: re-opens the boxand finds that truth, like a baklava bakedin the brain, only sweetens & congeals to realityin the cakepan of the neighborhood.
Fuck the lab, he says, forgets to tie his shoesand stumbles out the door, a man starvedfor truths he can touch and see and smell.
And yes, Schrodinger’s cat has crapped all over the lawn.Street people are panhandling planets like food stamps,and all the fundamental particles of the universe are
Down at the Seventh Street Soup Kitchen, ladlingout life in alphabets of stars, spellings of understandingwe can’t quite comprehend, can’t grasp, yet feelcompelled to explain.