Coffee House

The waitress brought his mocha on a tray,
he thanked her but he would have liked to say,
"you're very pretty", but this would not do
for a poor patent clerk, and married too.
He should have said," I will be famous soon",
but might as well have spoken to the moon.

The marbled patterns in the tabletops,
beneath the cake crumbs and the coffee slops
then revealed to him aether's janus face:
ten origins defined as time and place,
tensely reciting their mysterious rhyme
in ambiguous seas of space and time.

The curving saddle of the violin,
clasped to the softness of the woman's chin,
blended the interplay of cosmic fire
with high vibrations in the singing wire,
suffused Bach's ringing music in his blood
with thoughts of love and happy womanhood.

Like a wily goddess languorously
displayed, the universe humorously
played god's waiting game with her loaded dice,
against his equations until that nice
moment, revealing energetic charms,
she let her mass fall lightly in his arms.

Tormented fires, raging without a sound,
like unabated furies swirling round,
all neatly caught before he was quite sure,
in bold equations in his office drawer.
The three-page supplement should make it plain
another Newton had been born again.

The yellow dwarf was bending light from stars
before mankind had ever noticed Mars,
but now two expeditions caught Sol out
despoiling Newton's perfect world without
a doubt, and confirming, more or less, that
space-time was bent or slightly curved, not flat.

The cream expanding in the coffee cup
spawned galaxies before he picked it up,
the dreaming eyes within the gentle face
rested lovingly on the moving space,
no Riemann geometry was on his mind
when he observed the curves of womankind.