Richard Luftig

Relativity

Richard Luftig

The faster one travels in the universe the more time must slow down. Albert Einstein — General Law of Relativity.

But Einstein never endured my high school physics class that could turn a fifty-minute period into eternity as I who (as my teacher so often told me) did not know a fulcrum from a rugby scrum, a hypotenuse from a hippopotamus,

wished time to do its thing and pass. But it just inched forward, through the black hole of my adolescence, past not being cool enough to get a date, past the singularity that led me right through to invisibility.

Light years of college that continued the path then miraculously, marriage, my sweet wife and I two pulsars orbiting one another in a universal dance. Fatherhood with babies growing into toddlers when I wasn’t looking.

Teenagers telling me (repeatedly)how clueless I was, they, lost outside our gravitational grasp and me, a fading star, energy evermore spent with every passing breath. Now I look back at a galaxy of regrets, people I hurt, things I wished I could fix,

like an astronaut who knows how to make repairs on a ship speeding past the moon. But again, like so many times before, I close my eyes, hear Albert’s voice, German accent and all, steady as Venus holding its course in the early morning sky.

Don’t worry, he whispers. Don’t worry. The universe rushes away even as we speak. It always has. It always will. And no regret is ever allowed to travel faster than the speed of thought.

A Caucus of Crows

Richard Luftig

Yes, I know it’s called a murder, but all of the principle suspects in the case have been seen hanging around these windbreak trees

seemingly forever, deliberating among themselves about which fields of corn to invade and how best to hustle and steal

off with their ill-gotten gains right under the noses of straw-leaked scarecrows and faded plastic owls hired who-knows when

to keep the culprits away. The farmers who left this land long ago learned at their peril how these crows

have always been part of this place, its history, its DNA, like the rocks in the soil and the red clay

that turns to gumbo each spring and never has yielded a decent crop. Now these caucus thieves, high in their trees, make such perfect

gossips. They congregate in the branches like pickpockets searching for easy marks, holding court over orphan farmhouses riddled

with broken windows and out- of- plum doors, splintered porches and bare poles in front yards driven

into the ground, perhaps once holding up blue-painted birdhouses where wrens and sparrows

left long ago complaining over their living conditions being not up to code. And the barns and out-buildings,

riddled with mice, possums, the occasional hog-nosed snake, all left to fend for themselves, cold in the winter, almost brought

to boil in humid Indiana summer, having always to worry about northern harriers and great wood owls but allowed

nevertheless, to reside rent-free and proving again how squatters can’t always be choosers.

Richard Luftig is a former professor of educational psychology and special education at Miami University in Ohio now residing in California. He is a recipient of the Cincinnati Post-Corbett Foundation Award for Literature. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals in the United States and internationally in Canada, Australia, Europe, and Asia. His latest book of poems, A Grammar for Snow, has been published by Unsolicited Press.