Standing between the sun and moon preservesA certain secrecy.
Or seems to
Something inviolate if only
His father was an ape.
Sweet music
All of his walls sound hollow and he
Sighs in the paneling and
Melancholy voices.
So there is a
Behind the seamless arras and withinA living something:— but no door that
Admit the sunlight nor no windows
The mirror moon can penetrate his
With cold deflection.
He is small and
And solidly contracted into
Opaque and perpendicular which
Earth with its shadow.
And he
In shoes which bearing up against the
Attract his concentration, (Einstein upon a public bench Wednesday the ninth contemplates finity)for he
If there why then no farther, as,
Extensively the universe itself,
Or chronologically the two
Original and ultimate of time,
Nor could Jehovah and the million
Staring within their solitudes of light,
Nor all night's constellations be
Between his boundaries,nor could the
Receive him nor his groping roots run
Into the loam and steaming sink of
Where coils the middle serpent and the
Breeds maggots.
But it seems assured he
Precisely at his shoes in proof
He can revolve in orbits
The orbit of the earth and so
All planetary converse.
And he
Cloths that distinguish him from what is
His own circumference, as first a
Shaped to his back or modeled in
Of the surrounding cosmos and
Trousers preserving his detachment
The revolutions of the stars. (Einstein descends the Hartmannsweilerstrasse)His
And face go naked and alone
With what encloses him, as rough and
And sound and silence and the
Of rippling ether and the swarming
Clouding a privy: move to them and
Shadows that mirror them within his
In perpendiculars and curves and
And bodiless significances
As figures undersea and
Patterned from eddies of the air.
Which
Perhaps not shadows but the thing
And may be understood. (Einstein provisionally beforea mirror accepts the hypothesis of subjective
The petals of the enfolding world and leaveA world in reason which is in
And has his own dimensions.
Here do
Adorn the hillside and hillsides
The hazy marches of the sky and
Kindle and char to ashes in the wind,
And winds blow toward him from the verge, and
Rise on his dawn and on his dusk go
And moons prolong his shadow.
And he
Here as within a garden in a
And where he moves the bubble of the
Takes center and there circle round his
Like golden flies in summer the gold stars....rejects
Disintegrates.
For suddenly he
The planet plunge beneath him, and a
Falls from the upper darkness to the
And awful shadows loom across the
That have no life from him and suns go
And livid as a drowned man's face the
Floats to the lapsing surface of the
And sinks discolored under.
So he
Less than a world and must
Beyond his knowledge. (Einstein unsuccessfully after lunch attempts to enter, essaying synthesis with what's not he, the Bernese Oberland)Outstretched on the
He plunges both his arms into the
Of what surrounds him but the yielding
Excludes his finger tips and the soft
Will not endure confusion with his
Nor will the air receive him nor the
Dissolve their difference but recoiling
Back from his touch.
By which denial he
Crawl on the earth and sense the opposing
But not make answer to them. Put out
And let the old remembering wind think throughA green intelligence or under
Float out long filaments of amber
The numb and wordless revery of tides.
In autumn the black branches dripping
Bruise his uncovered bones and in the
His swollen tips are gorged with aching
That bursts the laurel.
But although they
His sense he has no name for them, no
To give them meaning and no
For what they say.
Feel the new summer's
Crawl up the warmed relaxing hide of
And weep for his lost youth, his childhood
And a wide water on an inland shore!
Or to the night's mute asking in the
Give back a girl's name and three notes together!
He cannot think the smell of after
Nor close his thought around the long smooth
And falter of a wind, nor bring to
Dusk and the whippoorwill. (Einstein dissolved in violins invades the molecular structure of F.
P.
Paepke's Sommergarten.
Is repulsed) But
Split out of trees and strung to tone can
Strange nameless words that image to the
What has no waiting image in the brain.
She plays in darkness and the droning
Dissolves to reverberations of a
Beating in waves against him till his
Trembles to rhythm and his naked
Feels without utterance in form the
Of dumb and incommunicable earth,
And knows at once, and without knowledge how,
The stroke of the blunt rain, and blind
The sun.
When he a moment
The hollow of himself and like an
Pervades all other. But the
Presses its dry insistence through the
That swims above it, shivering its
Back to a rhythm that becomes
Music and vaguely ravels into sound.(To Einstein asking at the gate of stone none opens)So then there is no speech that can
Their texture to clear thought and enter them.
The Virgin of Chartres whose bleaching bones still
The sapphires of her glory knew a word—That now is three round letters like the
Round empty staring punctures in a skull.
And there were words in Rome once and one
Words at Eleusis.
Now there are no
Nor names to name them and they will not
But grope against his groping touch and
The long unmeaning shadows of
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.
Yet speak them in their elements.
Whole,
Break them to reason.
He lies upon his
Exerting on Arcturus and the
Forces proportional inversely
The squares of their remoteness and
The universe.
Atomic.
He can
Ocean in atoms and weigh out the
In multiples of one and
Light to its numbers.
If they will not
Let them be silent in their particles.
Let them be dead and he will lie
Their dust and cipher them—undo the
Of their unreal identities and
The pure and single factor of all sums—Solve them to unity.
Scooped handfuls out of stones and like the
Let earth run through his fingers.
Well, he too,
He can achieve obliquity and
The cold distortion of the winter's
That breaks the surfaces of summer.(Einstein on the terrasse of The Acacias forces the secret door)
Facing the world upon a windy
And with his mind relaxes the stiff
Of all he sees until the heavy
Impend like rushing water and the
Hangs on the steep and momentary
Of overflowing ruin.
Overflow!
Sweep over into movement and
All differences in the indifferent flux!
Crumble to eddyings of dust and
In change the thing that changes!
There beginsA vague unquiet in the fallow ground,
A seething in the grass, a bubbling
Over the surface of the fields that
Around him gathering until the
Boils and under frothy loam the
Ferment and simmer and like thinning
The trees melt into nothing.
Still he
Watching the vortex widen and
In swirling dissolution the whole
And circle through the skies till swaying
Collapses crumpling into dark the
And motion ceases and the sifting
Opens beneath.
When he shall feel
His flesh with the rent body of all
And spin within his opening brain the
Of suns and worlds and spaces.(Einstein enters like a foam)His flesh is withered and his
And ashy bones are scattered on the dark.
But still the dark denies him.
Still
The dust his penetration and flings
Himself to answer him. Which seems to
Something inviolate.
A living something.
