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Steve Cooper is a retired professional career counselor. He lives near Salem, Oregon. He has one traditionally published picture book on Amazon, Don’t Eat Your Seed Corn, and several of his pieces have been published in the annual literary print anthology from Portland Writer’s Mill.
This obviously was written for someone important in your life. Whether a lover, parent, sibling, partner, or friend is up to us through what I like to call “reader license” (as opposed to poetic license). Time and space are such appropriate allusions.
Steve, you’ve done a terrific job of using cosmologic terminology in this poem. Even “bipolar,” a word usually applied to psychological disorder by most of us, has a meaning in astrophysics. Theorists may use it to designate what some call the central importance of extremity–which is clearly something of interest to you. Indeed, your celestial vocabulary elevates and emphasizes the simple emotional effects you describe. I feel those concluding three lines in particular. Well done!
I loved the mix of the unimaginatively infinite – elastic and expanding – with the importance of tangible everyday events that are so small in comparison while being of so much importance to the narrator. Instead of belittling the narrator, he grows in stature and significance in the universe.
I was reminded of the often quoted Einstein misquote: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT’S relativity”.
Thanks for the read, Steve. To have created such a fine cosmic-romantic poem is a great achievement.
What an extremely original conceit on which to build a love poem! I love the theme of expanding and contracting time and space, and how it relates here to proximity and distance — the idea is fascinating and, as it turns out, romantic as well! Beautiful poem.
Coherent heterometrics are wonders to behold. Look at Arnold’s “Dover Beach”. Stand fast!