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[with 3 poems by Britt Kaufmann]
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Constant
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The only constant is change.
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In any function, the constant is the number
hanging out alone, no variable at its side.
It is what it is.
Until calculus, when C becomes fixed but unknown.
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The coach’s wife says to him,
“Nothing changes, if nothing changes.”
He says nothing, but nods.
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Always plot time on the x-axis:
It’s the independent variable, always marching on.
Until it isn’t.
Like the shortest distant between two points is a straight line.
Except it might not be.
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I remember the non-trad who thought she could effectively argue
against non-Euclidian geometry to my old math professor,
both of whom then were younger than me now.
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How flat our first knowledge becomes.
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My future-physics-professor daughter
returns from the equator where she learned the Pachamama hug:
a spiral, like how they see time:
each moment a chord with harmonics of past and future.
What did they learn, so close to the sun,
watching the stars,
which is seeing time . . .
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We learn orbits, as if the sun didn’t also fly.
The helix of our DNA, more akin
to our planets’ corkscrew through the dark.
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I stare at images from the newest telescopes at the planetarium
in my Appalachian Mountains:
lost and dizzy trying to fathom the immense void.
Alone in the universe is really
alone in time.
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And what of the twins:
One went to space,
traveled so fast he became measurably younger.
Sure that plot twist shows on a graph,
crumpled into a ball, tossed in a trash can,
so he could keep his birthright.
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how precious this tiny world we burn. A magi’s gift:
watch chain and tortoise shell become slag and ash.
For what purpose, this rain of myrrh?
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Britt Kaufmann
from Midlife Calculus, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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TIME must be straight as an arrow, because you know if an arrow’s shaft has the least warp the bolt will veer and never come near the target, no matter how perfect your aim. Time must be restricted and prescripted like the graph’s x-axis, proceeding forever to the right with its hatchmark divisions each precisely the same distance from the last one and to the next one. Time must have some plan that makes everything make sense.
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Time being so steady, so reliable, how is that I’ve awakened from this busy dream, its urgencies and deviations and long drawn out doings, convinced that I’ve surely slept sound until down only to press the alarm and it’s 1:00 AM? How has time, restless and relentless, accelerated through these past two months of scheduling and planning Mom’s memorial service, then continued speeding right up to the flurry of texts and calls that crowd the minute when I shut off my phone and enter the chapel and the music begins, still stretching and rapping even until the reaching into my pocket and the unfolding of the poem I will read just before the closing hymn?
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And now time unspools and uncoils. A few hours on the porch this morning while the minute hands takes its own good time to tick over, everything shared with family over the past 48 hours seems to slow and spread. The passage is not yet in focus but shows its desire to take shape. Hours became minutes, now expanding again into hours. Time an arrow, or time a wave? Sinusoidal – will it crash or will the long swell fetch from some distant shore and lap our toes? One deep breath. I can’t yet recognize what I’m seeing, but I see that recognition might become possible, might just possibly someday arrive.
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❦
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The past is everything that has slipped the shackles of the present, but a memory is a bit of present still cupped in your hands. Not a crystal of time, not preserved in amber, but a flickering candle of time whose flame creates shapes of its own.
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My younger sister tells me her earliest memory of our mother is being rocked in the wicker chair in which she still rocks herself at her home in Black Mountain. My memories are wisps and phantasms; I can’t say I see those moments, more that I can feel brief spaces and elapses shared with Mom when I was a toddler.
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One vignette is clearer, though. We have boarded an airplane (in New York where we still lived? bound for NC to see Mom’s parents?) and we suddenly realize I don’t have Puppy. Did I leave him behind in the taxicab? Perhaps I wail, but when Mom hands me to the stewardess (this is 1955) and rushes away to find that cab, I feel a shriek rising even though I can’t hear it in memory. How long? How long? But now here she comes, Mom holding Puppy, back at last. Memory complete. Did we take off and land and get hugs from Nana and Grandpop? Perhaps, but all that memory tells me is that my mother was brave and undaunted, and that she would do anything for the little boy she loved.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Coastal Prayer
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In the pre-dawn glow, the pelican aunties
look down on me from their pier posts in sleepy disapproval,
their eyes set in Dia de los Muertos faces
as I paddleboard the calm intracoastal
before the boats wake.
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No, not me, out to sea, among the crashing waves,
yet still in waters beyond my depth on tremulous footing
where little fishes leap like dashes on a slope field,
the beauty of their tiny splashes mar the surface and make light
a terror flight from a predatory snapper.
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Give me a rule to follow:
+++ The constant rule through all these changes,
+++ The power rule to not give in,
Devise some rule so I make a difference
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Britt Kaufmann
from Midlife Calculus, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Why poetry, if not to struggle to make sense of life? (And if poetry can make sense of calculus and astrophysics at the same time, well, bonus!) And what is life if not its changes? An academic physician I knew referred to an unplanned occurrence which produced an unexpected benefit as “a fortuitous concatenation of events.” How fortuitous for Britt Kaufmann to concatenate calculus, the mathematics of change, with the middle years of life, that time of accelerating change in our bodies, our psyches, our circumstances, and reveal to us such a beneficial poetry.
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The set of all mathematical metaphors, as Britt so skillfully displays in Midlife Calculus, is very large, perhaps approaching infinity. The obtuse angles of her students’ exasperating density; the pointed and poignant trigonometry of the arc of her aunt’s dementia; even the calculating language of literary journal rejections: all of these and many more become functions and variables in the grand equation Britt sets herself: the struggle to make sense of it all. Perhaps there is no solution. Perhaps we can find some small gateway to acceptance, even joy, in irrational numbers. Perhaps I will come to the final page of this engrossing book, breathe deeply, and turn back again to page one.
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❦
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Midlife Calculus is available from Press 53.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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outlier
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+++ with gratitude for Julian of Norwich
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. . . but all shall be well
of a morning when
the dog thumps her thick tail on the kitchen tile,
a greeting, like the first cup of black coffee
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and all shall be well
of an afternoon when
in February’s chill, green cotyledons
sprout under lights in the laundry room
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and all manner of things shall be well
of an evening when
the weather warms, so windows are thrown wide
to the spring peepers’ sundown song
borne in on eddies laden with lilac
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. . . all shall be well,
and all shall be well,
and all manner of things shall be well
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Britt Kaufmann
from Midlife Calculus, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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V E R S E and I M A G E 
At this troubled time every act of recovery is in the past and future. I hope we will look to the past to shape the future. 1916 was forgotten in the business of the now.
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Thank you, Les. Is it too much to hope that our aging population may also become wiser? —B
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I love what Britt has done with the idea of expressing math concepts in poetic terms, similar to Claudine Moreau’s poetry of physics!
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Hey, Richard, took the words right out of my mouth! —B
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