Kevin Puts (b. 1978)

Einstein on Mercer Street

Text by Fleda Brown

While a student at the famous Polytechnic at Zurich, Albert Einstein fell in love with the only woman in his class, a Serbian named Mileva Maric, who at first was able to keep up with his mind. They talked physics and declared they’d never settle for a bourgeois life. Their first child, Lieserl, was born before Albert decided they could marry. They either gave her away or she died. Nothing is known about her.

They had two other children before their divorce. By this time, Mileva had given up her career and had sunk into a severe depression. A few years later, Einstein won the Nobel Prize and—even though he was married by then to his cousin Elsa—he sent Mileva all the prize money. Twenty-three years later, after Einstein had become a U.S. citizen and a professor at Princeton University, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan. Einstein had nothing to do directly with the development of the bomb. — notes by Fleda Brown

I.

Ah, Mileva, it’s always you I turn to

    in my thoughts, on my walks down Mercer Street,

lone old lump inside my gray raincoat,

the parabola of my felt hat.

    They keep me like a Kubla Khan

at Princeton. My floating hair they talk of:

His floating hair. Beware! Beware!

    Weave a circle round him thrice.

Reporters flash in my face. Even the bomb,

they claim, was my idea. One marketable God

    of the Intellect, they want. But what they catch—

each shot’s a different man.

Put them together, flip quickly,

    and I’m still, I swear, the man you once

thought: a motion picture, a wave, a music,

a disturbance in something else. In you,

    maybe, as you are in me. As if I’d never

left you. A man never loses the woman

he has children with. Even dead.

    It’s the hope—what we thought we could be—

that hangs like a moon

 over the field of my losses.

    Oh my Dollie, my schnoxel, this is your

Jonzerel-silly-names, fastened to you

by my nerve-endings. We were going to fly

    so far outside the gravity of the bourgeoise,

we would remain all thought, wit, music—

eternal students, the “we” of significant work,

    ein Stein, one stone. Then it all felt like stone.

Now I talk to myself.

II.

Still, somewhere inside the so-called ether,

    I feel you listening—dark, peevish

as always, your intelligence rasping like wire

against mine. Somewhere I’m still

    playing Mozart—in spite of you—half the night,

a fool for him, and Bach, their harmonies,

their unfailing return after infinite variations

    as if the starting point were all time sucked inward,

or some anthropomorphic God were calling

eternity back into this intersection with friends.

    Three Divertimenti: clarinet, piano, me on violin,

the children asleep, you my angry Mileva

curled in shadows, what we each called love, I guess,

    the mathematics we made of our marriage,

against the emptiness.

III.

It appears that the universe bends toward

    itself, a geodesic dome,

two hands, fingertips touching like a person

in thought. If I moved faster than light, I could

    draw the bow back

into the music’s mouth, rewind data.

Never allow, for instance, that monstrous

    nuclear heartbreak, not my invention—

it was the math that got pushed so far

off the edge of reason.

    Where were you? Turning back, giving up

your books, no longer able to follow me.

IV.

Rewinding: Up through swirls of snow, switchback

    turns, precipices, up to Splügen Pass.

You brought opera glasses

and my blue nightshirt. Heads touching as one,

    we studied a snowflake, fractal,

circular. At dawn we sent snowballs down the slopes,

imagined the village below, avalanched.

    Always we had to oppose, to disturb!

The disturbance of pregnancy, then:

our atoms inexorably carrying on.

    I withdrew, as I do, to follow a thought.

Even then I guessed the extremes things could come to:

the snowball chain of split nuclei

    that can start forking through Plutonium,

doubling, quadrupling from one generation

to the next in millionths of a second, releasing

    matter back to vast, primordial energy

you can never put your hands on again.

V.

I thought I was a pacifist. Good work needs

    a certain peace. Ah, then Lieserl—

we agreed, didn’t we, what to do

when she was born? So as not to undo

    the future. (Who knew then if we’d ever

marry?) “How do you have her registered?”

I had to know that, at least. To be a Jew—

    another strike against her. You think

it’s peace you’ve won, but sometimes

it’s only quiet, while the violence grows,

    a snowball chain where you can’t see.

After the boys were born,

Lieserl would knot and twist

    in my troubled stomach: this cramp.

Every day it feels as if I’m giving birth.

The doctors say drink milk and more milk.

    I wanted peace, so I could think.

This is what I get.

And in Germany, Hitler rose up

    like all my dreams of deformed children,

children sinking in the waves, children lost.

VI.

I note the universe goes from order to disorder,

    yet it remains. With my own eye

I saw a man fall from a building

into a rubbish heap and live.

    The man said he felt no downward pull,

which made me guess that we ride along

inside our own frame, you in your truth,

    me in mine. Why did I have to wear socks,

then, to please you? Because of a universal

fact: mass can’t help but bend toward mass.

    I like only shoes, these two boats

that keep me pretty much afloat

by themselves, an elegant sequence, like notes.

    Take Mozart: his perfect symmetry

that gets where it’s going. But there has to be

someone outside the music, to listen,

    for it to break the heart with joy.

Who else is left to listen to me, old enemy?

VII.

Since Elsa died, I’m down to

    Chico the dog, Tinef my sailboat—

worthless thing, but a pleasure—

and this fame. If I could do it again,

    I swear I’d become a plumber.

The mind can’t stand too much pure thought.

It oppresses. You oppress me

    still, my dear, forever brooding.

Things ought not be all probability. This

will make you mad: I told Elsa once,

    “If you (meaning her, of course)

were to recite the most beautiful poem,

it would not come close to the mushrooms

    and goose cracklings you cook

for me.” Plain things, like sailing.

I can sail now like a swan. I like to be

    carried along, making calculations,

but I admit, truth’s not ordinary:

it disappears as soon as you look.

    It’s like catching the wind,

trying to make it bend to fit your mind.

VIII.

When I was a schoolboy

    in the Alps in the rain

at the razor-edge of a cliff,

among small black birds,

    when I slipped

in my poor shoes and was barely

caught by a classmate—

    what do you think

would be the mathematics of this?

Since a person freely falling

    could go on forever,

and it’s only the sudden embrace

that holds you here,

    or there, how does one

show up at the coordinates

on time? Were we at the right

    place, or wrong,

my little veranda, my Dollie,

my little street urchin? We did

    save each other once, I think,

and once is all there is.

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