Relativity
The Fourteenth
Dalai Lama and the first
Albert Einstein say
everything’s related.
Yet we feel no movement,
no planetary rotation, no sense of
ellipsis, riding this rock around our star.
Nowhere on Earth
is the illusion of relative movement
more profound
than this self-serve carwash, equipment
going back and
forth, pitching up
and down, while I sit
again, childlike, feeling the car
move
when it’s not, my
gyroscope confused as easily
as a moral compass.
Big cloth rollers knock
the mirror askew: I see
that twin, who left on the spaceship
in 1969, has returned, not aged
in 40 earth-years. I'm
wondering if he's
come back
to take my place.