August 2016
Edward Nudelman
edward.nudelman@yahoo.com
A cancer biologist by trade, my poetry often explores the delicate balance between certainty and doubt, the tension between what we want to see and what we cannot see, color, taste, feeling, anxiety... and a dab of humor along the way to make it tolerable. I have three full-length poetry collections and a quiver full of poems in journals. 

The Universe is Expanding At an Alarming Rate

​
A pink skin rolls over clouds in the Western sky.
Birds rehearse in their hallelujah corner the music
of hierarchy and submission, melancholy overtures 
toward recovery. Einstein said to look deep into 
nature and you’ll understand everything better. 
For the novice astrophysicist, a worthy tidbit;
but the book of everything has many facets
as the steam train locomotive’s flashlight
casts its unchangeable mass-energy on us all.
More is the pity, I used to muse, trying to break
the sound barrier running home from school.
Now I know better, now I have learned to stumble.
Only two things are infinite, he said to me, through
his quasar: the universe and human stupidity. 
Both true, but only stupidity makes bad things happen. 
The universe just creeps farther away and away. 
I have therefore taken up a position at the edge
of apprehension, accepting nothing that is not 
as beautiful as beauty itself. The engine arrives 
tomorrow before it leaves today, a late addendum 
to the special theory, pleading like a thin sonnet 
simultaneously on the throat and in the palm.
©2016 Edward Nudelman
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