Vermin

It was essential, Einstein stated, that he bring his violin             
to Berta Fanta’s salon on Prague’s Old Town Square.
It is 1912, four years until Relativity, and six before                     
the first wave of the Spanish flu will kill, among the 
500 million infected, the painter, Egon Schiele, already             
despondent over the death, three days earlier, of his lover,

Edith, and their unborn child. Painting his pregnant lover 
the day before her death he could already hear the viola
and mournful bassoon of Mozart’s Requiem Mass. Ready
now to sketch himself dying, he gazes into the small square
of his shaving mirror, and recalls how he first entered the
Vienna Academy of Fine Arts at age sixteen, even before

his initial shave, no younger student accepted before
or since. He died, never to know he’d won that spot over  
the seventeen-year-old Adolf Hitler, who’d later loathe
“degenerate art” and “physicist Jews,” moving to Berlin
to pursue politics, aborting both brush and pen. The square-
root-of-time displacing millennia-of-atoms is music already          

usurping Einstein’s brain as, nodding to Max Brod, he readies   
his violin under his chin. The pianist, who already has four
of his 83 books penned to literary acclaim, looks squarely              
into the eyes of his closest friend, Franz Kafka. Brod loves         
his quiet companion’s unpublished scribblings, which violate 
all of fiction’s conventions. He had offered Franz absinthe

for courage before inviting him to Berta’s if he’d recite the                    
story about a transformation into vermin. Yet, rising to read          
to his fellow Jews, even Kafka cannot conceive of violence             
so extreme that each present will be dubbed a cockroach. For      
now, though, let’s leave these imaginative culture-lovers           
in paradise; and in a Kafkaesque absurdity of E=MC squared,   

time travel to British Columbia where we’ll reappear squarely   
inside a brothel owned by Bavarian born Friedrich Trump. The-
oretically viable, we can locate the villain who, full of self-love
emigrated at sixteen to avoid the military draft. He has already       
planned a move to Queens, where he’ll die five months before
Schiele of the same deadly flu, his atoms still infecting us via               

his grandson’s love of Hitlerian speech; even Kafka cannot square
anti-alien taunts with Melania’s Einstein-visa violation. I pray Thee    
Lord, a fevered Mozart pleads; forgive me, forget me, I am done for.