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Engaged

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , on October 7, 2022| 19 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Cal Nordt]

Happy Birthday! Not that it’s yours today but that you’ve had one (plus a few anniversaries) and can still remember when it is. Last Thursday at the hospital I tried to keep track of how many times someone asked Dad his birth date: the clerk at registration, the orderly leading us to pre-op, every nurse at every encounter, every blood draw, every consent, every med. The Urology resident, the Anesthesiology attending. Yes, Mr. Griffin, and tell me your birthday? Even after I’d put his hearing aides in my pocket, he managed to answer them all correctly right up to and including that one last time before they parted the curtains, wheeled him to OR, and pointed me in the direction of the waiting room.

Every ask is a reminder that in four weeks Dad will be 96. More than one scrubs-clad woman remarked, “I can’t believe that’s really your age!” Does he appear so young? I can’t see it – how different does 80 look from 100? No, my theory is that it’s because he is so present. He’s watching them, telling them his story even if for the dozenth time, questioning, commenting. Some might describe him as engaged – we, his kids, tend to call it sociable. There is some ineffable quality about my father that makes people want to talk to him.

I guess that’s how a person makes it to 95. When I ask Dad, “How was your day?” his answer is to tell me who stopped by for a visit or which family member he Zoomed (after he’s told me what he had for supper). And by the time I’ve finished writing this it will be only three weeks until Dad is 96. Which makes me . . . mmm . . . don’t ask.

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Turning Pages

Time the destroyer is time the preserver . . . T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages

We rode miles of rolling country roads,
past tobacco fields, crumbling farm shacks,
vast woods of longleaf pine.

Bike Rides with My Dad was her first book,
illustrated – words and crayon drawings,
her fascicles on soft cream-colored paper
bound in bright red yarn.

When that book was made, my bike tire
had gone flat – we walked two miles home
and talked the whole way. She was eight.
Spring was off in the distance,
after a month’s turning days.

Eighteen years later, it’s almost summer;
she’s half a world away, an artist teaching
English to children near Taipei. Our first
video call, miles of talk
on aesthetics and poetics.

“Does it really exist, this destroyer, time?”
Rilke asked years ago. But isn’t time
just a tablet of blank pages we draw on
that turn one way, while memory
turns the other?

Cal Nordt
from Mystical Fictions, © 2022 Cal Nordt

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I don’t think Cal Nordt is nearly as old as my Dad, although if you put them in a lineup I wouldn’t bet on you being able to pick the younger 5 times out of 10. (Did I just say that once you’re 80 you don’t look any different from 100? Ask me that again in ten years). One thing the two of them share, though, is that innate push to engage. Show up at a poetry event and there’s Cal in the front row. Even if it requires block and tackle, Cal is going to stand and read a poem.

I’m sure Cal’s desire to connect and to share are a big part of what drove him to create and compile his book, Mystical Fictions, a labor of many years. As I read and reread these poems, it’s just like we’re back in a late night kitchen somewhere swapping yarns. Maybe some of the events in these poems occurred when Cal and I both still had hair, maybe entropy is having its way with us and with those we love, but the voice that sounds through these pages is fresh and wry. His delight in the quirky nature of physical reality and the quirky reality of human nature are still delightful. Are we getting old? Hell, it’s all relative.

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Physics

I’m still frustrated by
gravity –
things falling
down.
But I’m OK with entropy
now.
And I’m OK with the arrow
of time.
If the arrow suddenly
switched –
and it all headed crunch-ward
(galaxies, the universe, etcetera)
and the shattered glass really did
jump
back from the floor
up on the counter,
while,
I’d be perplexed – liking
the one change, but maybe not
the other.
You can’t have
everything
your
way.

Cal Nordt
from Mystical Fictions, © 2022 Cal Nordt

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Stop Time

In jazz, when a chord is played only on the first beat.

To freeze time:
a sculpture
in a courtyard,
a flower pressed
in a book, a butterfly
flattened behind glass.
Why can’t we see things
without stopping them?

Like particles we can’t
throw light on without changing
by a photon’s reflection,
do we make them physical
when we stop addressing them
as points in a flow
missing certain coordinates,
the folded-in dimensions?
We press things flat to understand –
the smallest bits allowed in
our philosophy or science.
We call them probabilities,
not even a thing we can hold.

Words of ink on a page,
old photos . . .
Eternal is a dead end.
Life moves, sparkles in
another’s eyes, an instant’s
shared sense of what is:
wind on a leaf, rain
on hot tar, touch
of a hand then let go.

Cal Nordt
from Mystical Fictions, © 2022 Cal Nordt

❦ ❦ ❦

I couldn’t resist sharing the book’s cover with artwork by the Nordt Grandchildren, Elding, Jane, Owen, Tommy, Maggie, Joey, and Kit. Cover and book design by Cal’s daughter, Katie LaRosa.

 

Mystical Fictions is available through BOOKSHOP and (omg) WAL-MART.

❦ ❦ ❦

IMG_1783

 

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Curious

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on September 16, 2022| 7 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Joan Barasovska]

What is the perfect ripeness of Touch-Me-Not to pop its pods into my hand? How will the little brown kernels taste? How far would they fly if I didn’t catch them?

These questions I ask of myself, but I also ask them for the thirteen curious women who have enlisted me as their nature guide. Together we chew the little seeds – like untoasted sunflower. Together we are curious about everything. This tiny pale bloom with the three-lobed lip, how is it related to bright scarlet three-lobed Cardinal flower, gigantic by comparison? The white-striped red-lined caterpillar, what will its moth look like? Every one of these ferns, vines, sedges, mints, asters along the trail we’re walking, what is their family, who are their cousins, how did they get these odd names?

Maybe I’m too curious. Most of the other hikers have left me behind as we near trail’s end. It’s hard to pass even one speck of lilac among the Meadow Beauties and Dog Fennel. Hello, what’s this? A year ago near here I discovered a first (for me), a single plant, blue flowers with improbable arching stamens and pistil like dainty tusks. I thought it was extirpated when the farmer sprayed herbicide along his electric fence line last Spring. I have to kneel to examine this one small survivor. A single flower. Lamiaceae, Mint family – well, mints do make lots of seeds.

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Carrying Clare

Mystery conceived in passion
spreads a tent inside my body,
scoops out space
I’d blithely claimed as mine.

I grow heavy with her campsite
and the gear we’ve taken on.
After work each day I buy
a secret chocolate éclair
and eat it at Nelson’s Bakery,
where I’ll soon show off my baby.

Her father grants me
naming rights if it’s a girl.
On a cold day at the beach,
jacket straining to span my belly,
with one booted foot I trace
her name in giant letters
in wet sand: CLARE.

I pray this hidden daughter,
now assembling all she’ll require,
will live to be my better self,
take chances I could never take.
I pray for a safe birth.
I pray to be the mother she will need.

Her father and I wait for March.
He says she could easily be a boy,
but our daughter’s eyes, not yet open,
greedily seek mine.

Joan Barasovska
from Carrying Clare, Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte NC, © 2022

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Joan Barasovska’s Carrying Clare is a memoir in verse about the life of a family with a child who is critically and chronically ill. Will the baby live? Will the little girl’s illness rob her of childhood’s joy? How will a new baby brother shoulder his way into this picture? And most of all where does it arise, this deep well of strength in the mother who must watch her child fade and perhaps fail? Strength for the hours waiting outside surgical operating rooms, for the administering of medications and IV’s at home, for the nights bereft of hope? Where does it come from, the strength of such unrelenting love?

I ask myself one more question. What strength must it have taken to gather these poems across the decades of struggle they convey, to look them squarely in the eye and relive each moment once more, and then to share them?

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Strength

Ten-day-old Clare wails on an X-ray table,
her tiny ovaries protected, but she’s naked
on metal, flailing under strange light.
I sit rigid against the wall.

No one ever called me strong.
Fragile, even frail, a waif
without endurance. Not strong.
People have had to rescue me.

My baby’s body is red from screaming,
her back arched, skull uncradled.
I croon to her, my breasts leak for her,
but in her agony I can’t yet save her.

The technician finishes at last.
I dress and swaddle Clare,
give her my breast,
sate her with my power.

Joan Barasovska
from Carrying Clare, Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte NC, © 2022

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January Walk

Winter claims the day.
It hikes the road,
roams the fallow fields.
It lifts and stirs the air.

The horses I pass eat hay
and miss sweet grass.
Under a heavy coat
my heart beats hot.

I think of the baby tossing
in my daughter’s womb.
He floats in a weatherless world
while I lean into cold wind.

The horses stand side-by-side,
breath streaming hot in one fog.
The baby stirs in tight orbit,
waiting for March.

Joan Barasovska
from Carrying Clare, Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte NC, © 2022

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Thank You to Dee Neil and the Ladies Elkin Valley Trail Association for inviting me to be your naturalist for a morning. Walking out from Isaacs’ Trail Head on the Mountains-to-Sea trail for a couple of hours, we lost count of the number of wild flowers, ferns, vines, sedges, mosses, and other plants we discovered. And one boldly decorated caterpillar capped the day.

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2016-05-08a Doughton Park Tree

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Life Alert

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , on August 26, 2022| 9 Comments »

 

 

[with 3 poems by Miles A. Coon]

to become the very brink you live on . . . Miles Coon

The other day I was trying to fix my Dad’s Life Alert system while the rest of the family ate lunch fifteen feet away. I couldn’t figure out why the damn lights kept flashing. While I was cussing the instruction booklet – there’s such a thing as being written too simply – I overheard Dad tell my daughter, “Bill sure does a lot for us.”

Haven’t I always been the good boy? May I confess that all my life I’ve chosen to do things that would confirm my good boy status? Around 20 years ago I wrote a sonnet titled, Good Boy Turns 50; the closing couplet reads, So let’s give him what he needs in the next fifty / if he ever discovers what that might be. Was I trying to slip in a bit of tension there, as if maybe I don’t always like myself for striving always to be the person everyone likes?

Someday I’ll write a poem about being twenty and driving the interstate back to college from Pittsburgh with my friend John in the big bashed up Mercury I’d inherited from Granddaddy. One of the near-bald tires blew, and as we rolled to a stop on the shoulder we looked at each other and started to sweat. In the trunk, on top of the spare, was a big trash bag of illegal vegetation John had plucked up, roots and all, from where he’d been growing it out back of his parents’ estate while they were in Paris or Tokyo or some such. We tried to look purposeful, puttering around the trunk until the traffic thinned, then threw the bag up into the weeds (no pun, please), jacked up the car, wrenched on the spare, and retrieved John’s harvest. No lights & sirens. Back at school in central Ohio after dark, I unloaded John behind his dorm. End of story. Good boy escapes to be good another day.

Someday I’ll write a poem about that.

Not today.

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The Beginning

Before I had a self, I grew
in the half-dark, half-light world
I knew belonged to me.

Two disappointing gods
shaped me. Before I had
a self, I was a topiary.

Birds were everywhere
in me, singing, while I
stood mute.

One day, the gods split
this world in two.
Before I had a self,

I was taken by each of them
to the great sea of disillusionment,
thrown in from separate shores.

My first-self emerged from the sea,
my body soaked in brine.
I could taste my own salts.

To be washed clean,
to be naked and alone,
to become the very brink you live on

is to bury your gods,
as your heirs will bury you.
This is genesis, where we begin.

Miles A. Coon
from The Quotient of My Self Divided by Myself, © 2022, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC.

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As I reached the close of each poem in The Quotient of My Self Divided by Myself, I paused, loosed held breath, then returned to the beginning to read it again. Not because the poems are difficult to understand. The poems are so full of understanding I couldn’t hold it all in a single reading. The language is as beautiful and fresh as the stories are piercing and full of hurt, yet the speaker heals in the telling and heals us. Observer, actor, perpetrator – innocent, confused, divine – Miles Coon enters himself through doors he opens as if for the first time and enters us as if we are knowing another person for the first time.

I am still learning about myself from this book. Perhaps that is its theme, that we may explore our selves all our lives and never reach the end of our journey. How heartbreaking and how full of joy the final line of the final poem: How little of this world I know.

[Note: Miles died on May 21, 2022, just days before the publication by Press 53 of his first book-length collection of poems.]

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Where I Was Going

I.
Where was I going under the weight
of my bookbag, case law, and statutes? Not to the
Harvard Café for Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes.
Not to the cinderblock dorms, their dimly lit corridors
of thought. Not home. Where was I going so full of
argument and words?

II.
I joined the cynical and jaded. My father hired me.

Not to work next to illegal aliens in the plastics factory.
Not to load forty-two-foot trailer trucks with
one hundred forty thousand garment hangers, stacked
in cases, side-by-side, front-to-back, floor-to-
ceiling, every cubic inch packed tight.

Not to the boss’s office where the Harvard Law degree
vanished into uh-oh, here comes the boss’s son.
Not to the trade shows at the Hotel New Yorker
where I licked the soles of jobbers, plied them
with booze.

III.
Where was I going? To the fertility expert with my semen
in a jar? Never to Little League with my son. Never
to go ice-skating with my daughter. Where was I going?

Not three times a week to Dr. Bernie, self-indulgent,
taking a magnifying glass to my problems. He said
I had it wrong. We were removing the magnifying glass.

IV.
Where was I going, going to
my father’s funeral, my mother’s grave. I was going
to the closing when I sold the business. I was going
to my daughter’s wedding, to the firehouse where my son
showed me his gear and the enormous truck
he drove to Ground Zero.

Where was I going? Not to grow fables of my own
making: I was just going to my wife’s studio
to help support her art, I was going to write a poem for her,
always my best reader.

Miles A. Coon
from The Quotient of My Self Divided by Myself, © 2022, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC.

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Against a Wall

Sometimes, when the moon
is courted by wolves,
and the bats shake themselves out,

I’ll move through the mouth
of the cave like a breath,
press against the windowpane,

and there inside the house
a frail young boy stands stiff
against a wall. His father measures him.

His mother, tanned, hair bleach-blonde,
shines the sterling silver tray,
then serves a fifth of Haig & Haig

in the cut crystal drinking glass.
The boy’s dismissed
the minute his father takes a sip.

I’ve pressed my ear
to the landscaped ground
and heard the panic in his retreat

on tiptoe, in stocking feet.
His only trace, his father’s mark,
indelible on the measuring wall.

Though I cannot leave
the dark until it’s dark,
I do survive.

Here, inside the cave,
bats hang
harmless as handkerchiefs.

I can hear my tardy rebel stir
from years of sleep,
rising up, stretching his limbs,

hungering for light.
Soon, I will follow him out,
marking the walls as I go.

Miles A. Coon
from The Quotient of My Self Divided by Myself, © 2022, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC.

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It takes the lake to make a line of moonlight . . . Miles A. Coon, from Shadow Life

 

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