[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
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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.
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V E R S E ❦ I M A G E 