The Importance of Measure
After the German war, my father worked
as a top mechanical engineer at the Škoda Works
in Pilsen Czechoslovakia, where I was born
and from which we escaped to America.
In New York he designed machines in which
vertical stacks of lunch plates moved on springs
out of cylindrical tunnels one at a time.
Strength and design were everything to him;
after retiring he moved his hand tools, table saw
and milling machine into the garage
where he taught my son how to build things out
of wood and metal, the importance of measure.
Though I had his good eye and preached precision,
I managed to lose father’s best vernier and caliper
between piles of books in my study. His favorite
tool was made in his favorite material, hardened
stainless steel, produced in Japan before or after
the war by Mitutoyo. Its two pairs of caliper jaws
are used to measure the inner and outer diameters
of hollow pipe on either the 15-centimeter metric scale
above or the six imperial inches below a central groove
from which a thin finger of equal length can be extended
as needed to measure the inner depth of a tube.
A magical dial sits atop the vernier like an ugly clock
or malevolent eye and lets you measure in hundredths
of an inch. Below its glass face a wedge of abraded paper
makes the metal pan look covered in silver paint.
When I finally recovered this treasure, it still held oil
in its rails my father had placed more than a decade ago,
and the force of his memory, the importance of measure.
Michael Salcman, a poet, physician and art historian, was born in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. He was trained in brain surgery at Columbia’s Neurological Institute, has authored 200 scientific articles and six medical books, and is the former chairman of neurosurgery at the Universtity of Maryland Medical Center. His poems have appeared in Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Café Review, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, New Letters, and Poet Lore. He has received six nominations for a Pushcart Prize. He is the editor of Poetry in Medicine, a popular anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, illness, and healing (Persea Books, 2015). Collections include The Clock Made of Confetti (Orchises, 2007), nominated for the Poets' Prize; The Enemy of Good is Better (Orchises, 2011); and A Prague Spring, Before & After (2016), which won the Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press. His latest collections are Shades & Graces: New Poems (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020), the inaugural winner of the Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize, and Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems (2022).
“The best hand tool for measuring linear dimensions by adding a moving small vernier scale to the larger non-moving scale was invented by Pierre Vernier in 1631. Objects to be measured for either internal or external dimensions are placed in the open jaws of the calipers. The addition of a dial permits accurate measurement to hundredths rather than tenths of a centimeter or an inch.”