You and Your Place in the Space-Time Continuum by Greg Zeck

For Mike Peven

When you died they said you were only traveling,

you’d gone to a far better place than this place

with its beer, its books, its wine, its lovely women.

What the hell place could that be I was thinking.

At the gym, you bench-pressed two hundred pounds.

We had no idea you were going. You didn’t say

so long. You didn’t mention a cardiac condition.

So let’s get real. This is not Euclidean myth we

occupy anymore but the space-time continuum.

Let’s not play dumb. Time and space are bent

more than they were bent when you were living,

more than when we were grieving before the altar

on our knees, more than when we were spread

eagled at your grave, combining our velocity

and your gravity to appraise things as they are.

A flower can be placed there, a tear dropped,

a prayer or poem muttered, mourners moved

away, back to their own business, their own

race with mortality, the efficient experiment

replicated daily.

This much we know and we regret: while we

took off, per aspera ad astra, on the Apollo

poetry mission, you slowed imperceptibly

at the same time, unaccountably curving

your earthbody toward the center of the planet.

Objects in mirror are in fact much farther

than they appear.

Bio

Greg Zeck writes: "I'm a native Minnesotan who's published fiction and poetry in such magazines as Ambit, Bogg, Caesura, Moon Magazine, and the Spoon River Quarterly. A few years ago, I retired from college English teaching and freelance writing—and moved with my wife Jennifer to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where I read, write, hike, bike, and garden. In 2020 I published a first book of poetry, Transitions, and in 2021 a second book, Lost & Found: Poems Found All Around, both of which can be found on Amazon. I keep an occasional blog about writing and culture here."

Author's note

My recollections of the piece are pretty much as recorded in the poem itself: I'd met Mike Peven, the chair of photography in the art department at the University of Arkansas, in a gym where we exercised. (For an obit, see here.) Already, by the time he died of a heart attack at home, July 2017, Mike had a history of cardiac problems, and one of his amazing works of art was a gatefold brochure of photos called "Open...Heart Surgery," in which he laid open the heart that had been reconstructed during a previous surgery. (If you're interested in a photo of the artwork, I could ask his widow, Cynthia Peven.) Mike was a secular Jew from Chicago, not a believer but a wonderful, humorous fellow who came to Arkansas many years ago, married a local girl, never left the place. Rather than fitting Mike into a standard mythology, I thought his position as a secular person invited comparison to the scientific and secular myths of the modern world: Einstein's physics, not Hegelian metaphysics; doubt and yearning, not transcendentalism.