Love Letter to a Theoretical Physicist: Erwin Schrödinger, 1887-1961

“Genius is not a generous thing.
In return it charges more interest than any amount of royalties can cover”
- Jim Carroll, “8 Fragments for Kurt Cobain”

Root

the sketch of the Klimt painting had been
rubbed away with time, the pencil lines softened
into wisps of intimations, like strands of hair
framing the face of the first girl

he ever put his hands on, on the inside

cover of a notebook he used to understand
the tremolos of waves at the core
of the smallest specks in this universe.

on the sketch, the women swam like fish,
hair and arms and legs / the women swam with fish
to the place where the current is

ever deeper. years later someone will look back,
try to make out the faint strokes, ask them,

was this the root of his genius, wanting to understand
the way women rose and fell? in thirty eight years, was all
that he understood transmitted in those six months?

(he raised the curtains
just a sliver each morning, and turned
the room, with shadows of sleep still clinging fast,
into a camera obscura. just one look, before he closed the curtains
for a morning tryst.)


Arosa, Switzerland

Anny will understand. she always had.

it will not be her but one of his girlfriends, whose name
he chanted but we do not know.

she was slender, a lady finger that he crushed and
smeared all over the bed. he brought two pearls:

one for each ear. he brought another man's words:
work that he must do. and she, for two and a half weeks,

she was lain carefully on the bed, for inspiration.


Shooting Star in the Early Morning

Zurich superstitions is what everyone said, nothing
to be believed without some smelting. he was no longer
young, rolling toward forty, a shooting star that
missed his chance to blaze across the strings strung
tight over the clear field of mind.

careful! high voltage!
when the word genius is said, in heightened fever and higher
pitch, when Stockholm calls, no one can stop themselves
from falling into a reverie about man transcending
all that he is: small and selfish, cast from the gods, made to
labor at the foot of a mountain, never seeing the top,
the other side, or anything but the dirt, those little specks.

it's late. the depth lifts
to something approaching wakefulness. he will keep working after
the theatre of the evening before, but it will be long
before he plunges into the night, the night tossing him back:
a remnant of a star that took light-years to burn, seconds to fall.


Denouement

men think that what you needed was the release. you couldn't
think but for the crucible of passion, walls closing in.

a student, a student! a girl of seventeen! she didn't learn
calculus, just the configuration of her own body. when she saw

blood, you saw yourself out. Anny found someone else,
someone who understood symbols better than you.

it didn't escape your notice, your inadequacy, but you had
long turned away, defied demands you didn't care

to fulfill. you found a tightrope walker who lived in illusion, and took
his wife. you notebooks said that she helped, a circle

for completion, a star for the chores she did around the house.
if you had given a damn, maybe something for the daughter she bore you.

you said you needed them as guides, because you are
still a newspaper boy trying to find the right turn, a priest getting closer

to the divine through the tinnitus of sin and repentance, a child
forever, spoiled, an only child, with that strange sense of entitlement.

(maybe you, too, would have been better off
if you had died once you passed your thirtieth birthday.)

they are not your guides, just safe deposit boxes for thoughts
you are too scared to think on your own.


Unified Field Theory

he kept looking. the bodies crumble into balls of
waste paper in his hand, crumble and is taken out
with the other trash.

his viscera kept asking. red ague takes him, before
pneumonia, consumption, ashes.

(let me stand up and say:
you could never capture the core of women, your hope
in vain.)