Albert Einstein has served as a muse for writers, musicians, film-makers, sculptors and scientists.* He has also inspired poets such as Miroslav Holub and David Clewell, whose poem, “Albert Einstein Held Me in His Arms,” first appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of The Georgia Review. It is bloggily reprinted here with kind permission from the poet, although, as Clewell tells Discover, “I actually work on a typewriter, with real striking keys and honest, off-the-roller paper!”
Albert Einstein Held Me in His Arms
By David Clewell
although my parents didn’t know it at the time.
And if I knew anything, even on some vaguely molecular level,
I surely wasn’t talking. No one was the wiser, except
for Einstein, of course, taken with my small charms.
He was crazy about how I couldn’t stop smiling,
drooling in my carriage on a Sunday afternoon in Princeton—
the town my mother loved just driving to and getting out and
losing herself in, absolutely smitten. And my pedestrian father
was crazy about my mother, so even if that meant
another goddamn trip to Highfalutinsville, New Jersey,
he’d be there without fail, forever along for the ride.
The way I finally heard it, Einstein was on his knees
in a sweatshirt, rumpled chinos, and sneakers, pulling weeds—
Merely being himself, my father would say later, utterly impressed.
Einstein had that down to a science at 112 Mercer, the unassuming
white frame house where he cultivated flowers, where he played violin
precisely in sync with his favorite recordings late into the night.
Where he famously met with Bertrand Russell, Kurt Gödel, and
Wolfgang Pauli
for philosophic forays into the schnapps, then inevitably higher mathematics.
But on that one historic Sunday in the spring of my first year,
Einstein himself welcomed the unrenowned likes of my mother and father.
This twentieth-century giant picked me up with some easy peekaboo
small talk
in the last of the afternoon’s fading light until, eventually, genius
or no genius, I couldn’t take it anymore, and I made a tiny grab
for his wildly theoretical hair. And that was pretty much the end
of our ad hoc civilization that flourished for ten Princeton minutes.
When Einstein died only six weeks later,
every newspaper ran his picture, and all at once my father
couldn’t believe it: Wasn’t that the gardener who couldn’t get enough
of the baby? It says right here he’s Einstein,
the guy who revolutionized our thinking about time and space!
And what was that supposed to mean to him, exactly? My father
wasn’t Einstein, but he’d thought about them plenty, too,
deciding in his lifetime he wasn’t about to get enough of either one.
For years my parents never said a word about that day, as if
to remember it out loud would have been somehow unseemly—
a kind of bragging they never much went in for—rather than a celebration
of wonderful dumb-luck Sunday driving, like every happy accident
in the history of science or in those classic, unlikely stories
we can’t help going back to for their mythic staying power. So now let me
put it this way: Albert Einstein held me in his arms before he died.
Sooner or later we’re all trying to explain our particle selves
in light of our own cockeyed theories of relativity.
Someone in my family—my mother or my father, maybe me—
had to embellish at least some of the truth that comes, finally,
here at the end:
my mother’s horrified
that I’ve yanked poor Einstein’s hair, and she resigns herself,
sighing, It’s time to go. To prove there are no hard feelings,
he says something Einsteinian, like Yes, but what is time?—
which my father misunderstands as a question he can actually answer
at that very minute, so he says, 5:00. And before I know it,
because I am far too young to realize much of anything,
everyone’s in a sudden hurry back into their uncertain futures,
as if this whole thing never quite honestly happened, and in no time
it’s fifty years later, and I’m the one still alive, all that’s left
of the story, telling myself: Yes, it did. No, it didn’t. No, it did.
Note: David Clewell teaches writing and literature at Webster University in St. Louis and is the author of six collections of poems, most recently The Low End of Higher Things (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). The 2001 American poet laureate Billy Collins writes of Clewell that he “is an exuberant, inexhaustible poet and an insider on such diverse American arcana as forgotten Hollywood actors, flying saucers, CIA shenanigans, comic books, cereal favors, beatnik kitsch, and jazz. His unstoppable narrative energy and his multi-layered curiosity are almost enough to drive this poet out to the far right side of the page.”
*For a semi-complete round-up of books, plays, songs, movies and exhibits about Albert Einstein, take a look at the reviews section of Discover’s September 2004 special Einstein issue.
