Sitting Down at the Cosmos Diner

Sitting Down at the Cosmos Diner

"Whaddel it be?"
Ed*, the waiter asked.
"Well," I waffled,
"I can’t decide between a flat, a collapsing, or an expanding hamburger."
"Well let’s ask Al, the cook."
Peeking his head out from behind the grill,
Al said,
"Get the flat.  I’m always trying to make the perfect hamburger.
Who knows, I may get lucky, it might come out just right
and who wants a hamburger that folds in on itself ? -
a waste of money that has a nasty habit of exploding at the end."
"And what about the expanding one?"
"Ach!  That was my greatest mistake!
Once I made one when I was learning how to cook
and it expanded from the kitchen into the parking lot of the beauty parlor next door -
the ladies were so mad, I swore to God never to even think of it
if He would take it away."
"Well, in that case, I’ll take the flat.
I’m an artist, too, although I cook words instead of beef,
but I understand the need for perfection -
it’s how we measure ourselves, no?"
"Ja. Ja.  One flat coming up."
As Al sizzled the perfect burger,
I laughed, said to Ed, "Al came close to putting you out of business,"
failing to notice the imperceptible drift between the pupils of his eyes.




					Brandywine
					7/27/02
					
*The Ed in this poem refers to Dr Edwin Powell Hubble. During the 1920’s, most astronomers believed that the Milky Way made up the entire cosmos. But his deep search into space helped him determine that the Milky Way was just one of millions of galaxies. In 1929, after determining the distances of a number of galaxies and observing their redshifts, he showed that there existed a proportional relationship between distance and velocity, now known as the Hubble velocity-distance law of recession. At first he doubted that this relationship was evidence for an expanding Universe, but he later accepted this view after cosmologists pointed out that this was the only logical explanation. The Hubble Space Telescope is named after him. In 1917, Albert Einstein had already introduced The General Theory of Relativity and produced a model of space based on that theory, claiming that space was curved by gravity, and therefore must be able to expand or contract; but he found this assumption so far fetched, that he revised his theory, stating that the universe was static and immobile. Following Hubble's discoveries, he is quoted as having said that second guessing his original findings was the biggest blunder of his life, and even visited Hubble to thank him in 1931.

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