MYRON

We lunch at Spenger’s
a Berkeley fresh fish grotto built on
Ohlone bones and tall tales
about marlins that fought for
hours
Dining in this place is like
dining on “The Sea Hawk” (1940)
but we aren’t moving, but
maybe we are
By the time we finish lunch
the earth will have traveled
6500 miles
and don’t expect Errol Flynn, in
pirate costume, to swashbuckle
across the floor, nor do swords
cross at this site, only knives
and forks, going at the mussels
clams and shrimp
It is rumored that
Clark Gable once sampled
the famous clam chowder of
this restaurant where a
a Polynesian wood “idol”
greets the diners
Myron and Sonya have
joined us
I’m having blackened catfish
They pry their meals from
shells
They’ve stopped off in
Berkeley on the way to
SFO

His destination is Dallas
He heads a department
of physics there
She’s going to Santa Fe
to inspect their new home
I overheard two shaggy
professors, old, soft and retired argue
about science in the men’s locker
room at the Berkeley
One said that science is
only a method and
that science can’t
explain gravity
I can
Sonya is gravity
And not even chemo or
infusions can
come between her and her
students as she fights an
invader like the Russians
fought at Leningrad
I imagine Myron as a youngster
While his friends are trading baseball
cards
he’s reading Einstein
and making experiments
in his parents’ basement
His Mom and Dad would call
these experiments
explosions
He’s studying applied biology
because
soon he says they will be able
to swab the inside of your
mouth and with
the DNA collected predict
diseases
to which one is prone
and prescribe medication
He says that the universe’s speed is
accelerating and I read
“If the universe continues accelerating, astronomers say, rather than
coasting gently into the night, distant galaxies will eventually be
moving apart so quickly that they cannot communicate with one another
and all the energy will be sucked out of the universe”
and I’m thinking,
if this happens
what will become of my
archives? But Sonya
reassures me
“Cosmologists are given to
hype as in hyperbole”
I ask Myron
about Michiko Kaku’s
prediction that
time travel will enable a
person’s descendents to visit
that person
Hong Kong scientists
dispute the idea
They say that they
have proved that
a single photon obeys
Einstein’s theory
that nothing can travel faster
than the speed of light
I think they’re wrong because
every time I talk to Myron
I feel that someone is visiting
me from the future.

Ishmael Reed copyright ©2011