Samuel Washington Allen Prize Honorable Mention, selected by Lloyd Schwartz
Hawking, My Father and I Expand Relativity and Ancestry in the Language of Theoretical Physics
For my younger children
Unasked, Hawking used the tools of science only
to describe the shape of the Grand Beginning,
tried to sketch out the unifying origins of our Universe
with math for his never-finished Theory of Everything
without any reference to God, faith, belief. Working alone,
he moved beyond Einstein’s Space and Time,
began by thinking his way right back to the expansive
theoretical moment of the Big Bang, to the very
inception of our ticking clock. Then he narrowed his thoughts
down, hoping to identify the quantum instant
when a few Higgs bosons went crashing about, bold,
tickling the quarks, breaking strange symmetries
wave after goddamn particle wave, slowing, cooling,
adding weight and mass where none before existed,
creating something new in the theatre of heaven.
In the end, without knowing, perhaps he even thought
right to the edges of those stellar singularities where
God might have taken up hiding after using
these same processes, exhausted, resting that seventh day
after being the first to speak the word “Light,”
waiting for the right moment to set down Adam and Eve
into the Garden of the Unforgiven.
These are the kinds of things Hawking knew how to do
with ease, the gravity of his own thoughts
holding him firm in Newton’s chair, the muscles near
his right eye slowly twitching carefully selected
words, tricky equations
* * * * *
Asked, before I left to live in Argentina, just so I would know,
my Father charted out the lines of my immediate
ancestry, factored them down as if he were deeply engaged
in scribbling out his own version of a math equation,
one focused on the simple process of multiplication.
He drew all the family tree lines then added
the names, dates and numbers from memory, right back
to the eight dimensions of the fourth generation,
direct, none removed. Without boasting, he said he could,
if I wanted, draw the lines back to 14th Century
England, a Time when the name of our ancestor Roger,
a ship’s chandler, was listed in an old, old Book
as the mayor of King’s Lynne, an indented port on The Wash,
off the North Sea.) He punched black holes in the page
as if it were its own Galaxy, looped a thin blue ribbon
through them, connecting the branches,
the Space on which the names nested. Then, thinking of
the parameters of Pedigree, he tied it into a continuum
that undulated like those dark gravitational waves
in the firmament, urged me to remember the eternity,
the “foreverness” he said, of it all, even though he knew
that would be a long Time to hold the thought.
These are the kinds of things my Father knew how to do
with ease as he sat at the kitchen table that night
recalling those who had been Heaven-sent before him.
* * * * *
Unasked, but so you can have a deeper sense of origins and self,
here are some of the elements from your own
arcs of familiar experience that coalesce within your inner nebulae,
help shape your identity:
I.
the expanding, smooth Space occupied by your mother’s own
transparent black matter:
the undulations, the slowing pace of Time encountered
on Zanzibar, the event horizon of five female figures,
draped black as night in their bui buis, moving along
Gizenga Street, the amount of Light they swallow up
late in the afternoon as they slide their shade across
a mosque’s sun-perfected white—an Aleph in Old
Stone Town, the mysticism of their transformation into sails
on spice-ladened dhows, drifting away side-by-side
from Jozani at midnight, vibrating, curving the Earth’s
sea sphere north, a slow, expanding wave front
headed toward Oman, to the souks at Muscat, eyeing
to trade for handfuls of golden earrings,
bags of honey-yellow amber, insect’s wings still visible;
II.
the swirled warps, the stellar Light images in your father’s
English thoughts:
the blended maze of Cavendish theory, the thoughtful
leaps, the mathematical puzzles, the size
and shape of spontaneity—the elegance of all blatant
creation, the resolution of all these intricate
ingenuities, the twirl of green stained glass oscillating,
unwinding slowly like Hawking’s own Time
in the jumbled lane ways near Regent Street and
the Cambridge Market, the uncertainty of
the breeze as it teases and twists the medallions, bends
new Light from their hanging places, then,
refracting, perfects its own prism work, the path Sun’s
glower follows as it scatters soft spectrals
here and there, throws tiny rainbows, colorescing
each hard, dirty brick, then, lessening at
Evensong, brings its reflection to an end;
III.
the diminishing Space and the rhythm of Time Monarchs
have left on either side of the present near your
grandmother’s house in Pacific Grove:
the quantum entanglement awaiting them as they bunch
together at evening, camouflage into the eucalyptus
and the pines, at rest though nestling as the sea breeze
whispers up the hill, their waiting for the warmth
of another morning’s sun to persude their wings that they
can fly again, the butterfly kisses, the sustaining
sweetness of Manitoba milkweed, the length of the next
generation’s journey home to Canada;
IV.
your grandfather’s Wildwood, deep in the folds of
a narrow Utah canyon:
where the sun has to fight for Space each morning,
where on Sundays, dappled by the Light,
we learned to ask for God to be with us, until those
Edgemont men told us we shouldn’t do that
anymore, the swinging bridge where each crossing
was an adventurous leap toward some kind of
nervy limbo, a rising, whenever another child jumped
on the rubber tread, flexed the bridge back,
lofted you up, away, standing you on air—like riding
the ruffle in a sheet as it’s lifted and tossed
to fit a bed, the child-sized picnic table—there, beneath
the hummingbird’s dark-red river birch,
cluttered with carpenter’s things, leftover nails, screws,
hammers, odd pieces of wood, small saws,
chisels, purple-chalked snap lines—daring you to do
your own building there, anything you wanted,
your own world if you wished! where every other day,
the Heber Creeper, whistled and clacked,
passed on the other side of the river, pressed your pennies
into pocket charms on the tracks, made Abe’s
beard much longer than it really was;
V.
The fluctuating Space, the Light-ladened messages hidden
in the fireworks set off by your Chinese forefathers
in the villages of Guandong:
ricocheting off and above the dragon-arched protection
of the village gate, curling up, then scrawling,
like sparkler writing on the Fourth of July, Chinese
characters for joy and prosperity in the New Year’s
midnight air, the length of the moment it took them
to realize that they would someday drag
the practice to the green rolling hills of Trinidad,
to the village of Rio Claro, near the beaches at Mayaro,
become merchants there;
VI.
the cosmology of questions embedded in Trinidad’s folklore,
the stories retold by your brown-girl Spanish
grandmothers:
how the five-ridged waxy carambola knows to rise
above the horizon, shine as star particles
in the night sky, what tales the duendes are looping
for the children’s limbo-hidden spirits that might
set them free from the tangled, rooted dungeons of
the imposing silk cotton tree, why the dangerous
gravitational waves at Maracas seem to murmur over
and over “cum out here, give us ya chil’,
cum where its deepa, bluea, cum bade in de salt . . . . “,
which village slave auntie first added the shadowy
deep-green taste of chandon-benit—coriander—to spice
the sloppy callalou, why the puffed-up crapaud toad
gives up its distinct, deep croaks, ceases to speak,
after the obeah man buckles its black-hole mouth shut,
curses it quiet, how many brown cocoa beans it would
take to make a sweet bag of Hershey’s Kisses
after they have been sweated then danced around the box,
oiled up for the 50-kilo bag, how you as giggling
children, without knowing why, learned to call the sharpness,
the reach of the sword plant—“mother in law’s tongue!”
These are the kinds of ancestor-based experiences that I can
identify with ease as I sit here writing that imprint your
identity during your visit to this Garden of the God-Forgiven.
Simon Peter Eggertsen was born in Kansas, raised in Utah, schooled in Virginia and England, now lives in Cambridge. He came late to poetry. His work has appeared in Nimrod, Spoon River Poetry Review, Ekphrasis, Atlanta Review, Vallum (Canada) and New Millennium Writings, among others. He has a chapbook to his credit, Memories as Contraband (Finishing Line Press, 2014).