POETRY

The Salmon and the Universe

Stephen Hawking pops over for dinner

I was gone a minute, maybe two, to tear some lettuce and slice a little cucumber taken from the garden earlier, the final touch a squeeze of lemon, a splash of olive oil.

I’d left the salmon, which at that moment the dog was eating, on the dining room table beside a copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, that I’d planned to take a look at over supper.

He was climbing down off the chair when I came back into the room — the dog, that is, not Stephen Hawking — the plate with the salmon empty, wet with what looked like morning dew, as if it had been left outside overnight.

I shouted and swung my foot in his direction, and if I’m honest, made contact, and pledged to never speak to him again, for that was my dinner and not only had he already had his, I doubt he even tasted the salmon.

Later, alone with my thoughts, imagining, as much as I’m able, the vastness of the solar system and the Milky Way, and the multitudes of galaxies stretched out beyond the sill of my bedroom window, across the universe through time and space, thousands of millions of light years from the spinning blue planet where my pajamas are kept folded in a wooden dresser, it struck me that whatever I, my dog, and a salmon marinated in a ginger sauce got up to on a Wednesday evening in July, probably didn’t matter much.

Mind you, if it had been Stephen Hawking climbing off the dining room table after wolfing down a salmon all to himself, we’d have felt a shift in the universe, for I would have been shouting at Stephen Hawking, the noted theoretical physicist, and kicking him in the rear as he slunk out the door.