Einstein
Ken Haas
He could have just told us the scientific
truth. That E equals m.
c squared? He made that part up.
It’s a constant
so if smaller units of measure are picked for E
and larger ones for m
c just disappears
into the pure equivalence of energy and matter.
He could have fixed on any fixture:
furlongs from Venus to Mars,
combined weight of oceans,
girth of a pin.
In choosing as his fiction
to mediate between E and m
a figure in the billions
marking light and speed
he was making an artistic decision,
telling us the way, say, Beethoven did
how small things are relative
to the forces that drive them
(the sun’s mass a dog bone
to its own hellfire,
the thousand-year oak a scrag
to the wind that wants to get crazy)
how insatiable the love
between energy and matter
and how dark the human harness,
how useful light would be,
lots of it, squared,
how wise it would be
to come quickly.
The Downlookers
Ken Haas
Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,
is how I became one,
on the daily march to junior high,
policed by the Dyckman gang
to warily skirt every sidewalk line.
Friends from the burbs and even darker hoods
joined in their own ways,
back before owners had to scoop up after their hounds,
back when having the wrong guy
think you were looking at him
wasn’t just a bad movie.
We’re the brooders, the schemers,
the director at a Hollywood pool party with the foot fetish,
the golfer who has no idea where her drive went
but always picks up the tee.
We’re not chatting in elevators or going to air shows,
dropping pencils to peek up the cheerleader’s skirt,
or pointing at heaven after a goal.
Go ahead, color us hostile, skittish, shamed.
But it’s a life. One not without pride.
And there are more of us now,
driving while texting, texting while crossing the street,
panning the beach for coins, checking the cup for alms.
Watch out for us.
The puddle makes more sense than the rain.
We know the price of connection,
the vanity of seeing what’s coming,
the broken glass, the rusted key in melting snow,
the blade of grass that has won its war with the street.
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Ken Haas lives in San Francisco where he works in healthcare and sponsors a poetry writing program at the UCSF Children’s Hospital. His poems have appeared in over 50 journals, including Clare, Freshwater, Helix, Natural Bridge, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Quiddity, and Spoon River. He was the winner of the 2020 Red Mountain Press Discovery Award for his poetry collection, Borrowed Light. You can visit him online at kenhaas.org.