December 7, 2025: “The Spouses Waking Up in the Hotel Mirror,” Almost Migraine, “Writing Life of Charles Dickens”

Being a poet and blogger is sort of like constantly looking at yourself and your life in a mirror, but not in an egotistical way.  You look to understand and interpret, maybe to find something beautiful.

I’ve been a writer my whole life.  I have a box of old diaries and journals under a bed.  They go all the way back to the fifth or sixth grade.  It was at that time that I decided I wanted to record my thoughts and feelings and experiences.  Gabriel Garcia Marquez has a short story about a family who finds an angel in the backyard; they tie the angel up and charge people money to see him.  I first read that story when I was in ten or eleven, right around the time I started my career as a diarist.  (By the way, I’ve never had the courage to go back and reread those old notebooks.  I’m afraid of what I’ll find out about myself.)

Sharon Olds spends some time gazing at herself in a mirror . . . 

The Spouses Waking Up in the Hotel Mirror

by: Sharon Olds

The man looked like himself, only more so,

his face lucent, his silence profound as if

inevitable, but the woman looked

like a different species from an hour before,

a sandhill crane or a heron, her eyes

skinned back, she looked insane with happiness.

After he got up, I looked at her,

lying on her back in the bed.

Her ribs and breasts and clavicles had

the molded look of a gladiator’s

torso-armor, formal bulge of the 

pectoral, forged nipple, her deltoid

heron-elongated,

I couldn’t get her provenance

but the pelvic bone was wildly curled,

wrung.  I could see she was a skeleton

in there, that hair on her body buoyant

though the woman was stopped completely, stilled as if

paralyzed.  I looked at her face,

bloom-darkened, it was a steady face,

I saw she was very good at staring

and could make up her mind to stare at me

until I would look away first.

I saw her bowled, suffused forehead,

her bony cheeks and jaws, I saw she could

watch her own house burn

without moving a muscle, I saw she could light

the pyre.  She looked very much like her father, that

capillary-rich face, and very

much like her mother, the curlicues

at the corners of the features.  She was very male

and very female.

very hermaphroditical,

I could see her in a temple, tying someone up

or being tied up or being made nothing

or making someone nothing,

I saw she was full of cruelty

and full of kindness, brimming with it—

I had known but not known this, that she was human,

she had it all inside her, all of it.

She saw me seeing that, she liked that I saw it.

A full life—I saw her living it,

and then I saw her think of someone who

ignores her rather as her father ignored her,

and the clear, intransigent white of her eyes

went murky grey, the sections of her face pulled

away from each other like the continents

before they tore apart, long before they drifted.

I saw that she had been beaten, I saw her

looking away like a begging dog,

I averted my eyes, and turned my head

as the beloved came back, and came over to her

and came down to me, I looked into his iris

like looking at a rainstorm by moonrise, or a still

winter lake, just as its cleavages

take, or into crystal, when crystal

is forming, wet as nectar or milk

or semen, the first skein from a boy’s heart.

Looking at yourself closely can be an unpleasant experience.  Olds sees the woman in the mirror not as a reflection of herself.  Rather, she’s able to step outside of her body and appraise herself honestly, without flinching, each hair and scar and blemish mapping her skin like roads and rivers.  The spouse in the poem ignores these imperfections.  He comes to her at the end, his irises looking like “a rainstorm by moonrise, or a still winter lake . . .”  To put it another way, he sees her true self.

So, now it’s my turn to look at myself in the mirror today.  I played keyboard for two church services this morning.  Then I attended the annual Tuba Christmas concert, live-streaming it for the library.  (If you’ve never read heard 30 tubas and euphoniums in one enclosed space playing Christmas carols, you don’t know what you’re missing.  Or maybe you do.)  Then, some shopping.  (I purchased two really ugly Christmas sweaters for myself.)  Finally, dinner (grilled turkey and cheese sandwiches with chicken noodle soup) and a Zoom poetry workshop (the best part of my day).

My whole weekend was like that—one thing after another thing after another thing.  I haven’t really had a whole lot of downtime.  When I got home from Tuba Christmas and shopping, I sat down on the couch to relax for a few minutes.  I turned on the TV, and suddenly my head started pounding and my vision blurred.  My first thought:  I’m having a stroke.  My second thought:  at least I won’t have to grade my students’ final papers.

I lay back on the couch and closed my eyes.  I could feel the room spinning behind my lids.  In the past, I have suffered from bouts of vertigo.  Only once have I experienced a migraine.  After about a half hour, I opened my eyes and got up to help my wife do the dinner dishes and pans.  I could still feel a dull throb in the back of my head, but the world wasn’t merry-go-rounding anymore.  My vision was clear.  

I think I was on the verge of a migraine.  So, I had an almost migraine, I guess.  When I described my symptoms to my wife, she said, “It was a migraine.  You’ve been so stressed.”

My wife was my mirror tonight.  After she made that comment, I thought about the last couple weeks—Thanksgiving, a blizzard, Christmas trees, grading, programs.  Plus all the normal holiday hubbub.  And 30 tubas and euphoniums.  She was right.  Stress + Tuba Christmas = Almost Migraine.

I’m doing better now.  The poetry workshop was the highlight of the weekend.  A couple hours writing with some really good friends was just the medicine I needed.  I’m not quite ready for a new week, but I’m not cemented to a couch with a pillow over my face to block out the light.

Saint Marty wrote a poem for tonight, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:

Write a poem in the form of a to-do list, preferably a to-do list of a famous literary figure.  What would Henry David Thoreau have on his to-do list?  How about Gustav Flaubert?  Perhaps Emily Dickinson’s to-do list would include practicing her scales, writing a letter, baking a ginger cake, ironing her white dress, identifying wildflowers, witnessing a funeral, and quarreling with her sisters or brother.  You will likely need to spend some time to get the order of your list just right, saving the best for last.  Your poem may be humorous or grave/poignant.

Writing Life of Charles Dickens

by: Martin Achatz

Writing 

is like

a long midnight walk

through London streets

when even pickpockets

have gone to bed

in some dark alley

Elizabeth Tower caped

in fog and frost

lost

save for the chimes

quarter past, half past,

quarter to it, the hour

itself—Ga-dooong!

pens lined above

a sheet of Foolscap

well filled with ink

black as a grave

a cup

of strong tea

steeped black

served with a lemon

wedge and biscuit

hawthorn

currant

oolong

a child’s cry 

for water 

after a nightmare,

to douse 

fear blazing 

in his chest

a sunrise

so dazzling

it hurts

to even 

step outside

December 6, 2025: “Cool Breeze,” Missing in Action, “Saturday Afternoon Poetry Reading by MFA Students”

Yes, I have been missing in action for quite some time.  I have no good excuse, aside from exhaustion and shortening days.  Around this time last year, I was sliding into a deep depression that lasted quite a few months.  So I have been keeping pretty close watch on my state of mind and mood.

A lot has happened since my last post.  Just a quick recap:  I got a new car—another Subaru Impreza (an offer from the dealership I couldn’t pass on); Thanksgiving came and went with a raging blizzard that lasted about three days (and about 26 inches); my daughter turned 25 yesterday (hard to believe she’s that old and I haven’t aged at all); and the holiday season is upon us (theme for our front porch this year—A Bigfoot Christmas).

Perhaps the reason I tend to get a little (or a lot) blue this time of year is nostalgia—the sentimental longing for a period, place, or person with wistfully happy associations.  Of course, there’s no way of reclaiming the past, unless you’re Marty McFly or Bill and Ted.  

Sharon Olds gets nostalgic for an old lover . . . 

Cool Breeze

by: Sharon Olds

You talked to me a lot about your kid sister,

Rebecca, a.k.a. Reebabecka,

and you knew me as my sister’s kid sister,

fourteen, and a late bloomer, and homely,

you talked to me about your family,

and your dream of cutting an LP,

and the Juniors and Sophomores you were in love with, or who

were in love with you, or who maybe you had slept with—

they were White, as I was, but you called me Miss Shary

Cobb, Miss Cool Breeze Herself.

You didn’t mind I was in love with you,

you were Senior Class President.

And you would dance with me, astronomer

who pointed out to me the star

bright of the cervix, when we danced it became

exact to me, far inside me

in the night sky.  And you would park with me,

you would draw my hand gently across you, you had

mercy on me, and on yourself.  When you would

slide your hand up under my sweater,

my mouth would open, but I’d stop you, and you would

say, rather fondly, Protecting your sacred

virginity?  And I would say Yes,

I could always tell you the truth.

When the White cops broke up the dance in your neighborhood,

your friends worked to get us out the back

unseen, if the cops saw us together

they would hurt someone.  We crouched behind a hedge,

and I began to understand

you were less safe than me.  Squatting 

and whispering, I understood, as if 

the bending of our bodies was teaching me, 

that everyone was against you—the ones I had called

everyone, the White men

and the White women, the grown-ups, the. blind

and deaf.  And when you died, your LP cut,

and you had married the beauty from your neighborhood,

when you went off the coast road with your White

lover, into the wind off the ocean,

your Jag end over end, catching fire—

I knew that my hands were not free of your

blood, brother—Reebabecka’s brother.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into Olds’ poem, but I do feel a certain sense of nostalgia—the speaker yearning for Reebabecka’s brother and all that he meant.  Sex and race and class and mortality all rolled into one.  Olds, in some way, holds herself responsible for high school lover’s death (“my hands were not free of your / blood”).  

Today at the library, I hosted a reading of MFA poetry students from the local university.  There were about six of them.  All so young and full of hope.  I remember being like them when I was in graduate school—thinking I was going to get a job as a full-time professor, publish a few books, win the Pulitzer Prize, and be set for life.  That’s where they all are right now.  Ready to take on a world that isn’t always that nice to poets.

I found myself getting a little wistful as I sat listening to these grad students share their work.  At the end of my MFA program, my wife had just given birth to our daughter, and I thought I had the world in my hands.  Anything seemed possible.

Then everything came crashing down.  My wife started suffering from serious depressions (she cut her arms and breasts with scissors, leaving scars) and was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder.  A year or so after that, she fell into a cycle of sexual addiction that almost ended our marriage several times.

In short, I really don’t feel nostalgic for all of that shit.  I wouldn’t want to go back to that period in my life for anything.  Except for this:  holding my infant daughter in my arms as she drifted off to sleep, or braiding her long hair after she took her baths.  I miss being everything to my kids—protector, friend, chauffeur, sage, comedian.  There was a time I walked on water as far as my son and daughter were concerned.

My daughter is in medical school now.  My son will be graduating high school this spring.  He’s already talking about moving out.  The future is bright for both of them.  Me?  I have more years behind now me than I have ahead of me.  That makes me a little sad.  (Just a little.  Don’t worry.)

I know I’m very blessed.  My kids are healthy and smart.  My wife has a job she loves, and she’s been doing well with her mental health and addiction issues.  We are more a team than we’ve ever been.  Blessing after blessing after blessing.

Ten years from now, I’m probably going to be nostalgic about tonight.

Saint Marty wrote a poem for today, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:

Try writing some haiku that resist being about apple blossoms, insects, or frogs.  Instead use the 5/7/5 syllables in a series of three-line poems that deal with subjects such as bad hair, infectious diseases, or people who’ve never heard of Rumi.

Saturday Afternoon Reading by MFA Poetry Students

by: Martin Achatz

they read earnestly 

shaping words into creatures

feral as blizzards

I sit in the back

listen as they free their tongues

birds, birds, everywhere

they are all so young

ferment full, ripe as apples

I eat and drink them

when I was their age

I swam in Superior

naked, skin on fire

I’m an old sonnet

iambic, without couplet

don’t volta me yet

November 16, 2025: “1954,” Tragedy and Loss, “All Breath”

It is the end of a long weekend.

I spent yesterday in Calumet, Michigan, leading a writing workshop, attending a catered dinner, doing a poetry reading.  I left home at around 7:30 a.m., finally got back around 11:30 p.m.  I’ve been in recovery mode today.

On my way to Calumet, I received a text message from my sister-in-law.  (Really, she’s like my little sister.  I’ve known her since she was since she was 11 or 12.  We’ve always had a close bond.)  She wanted to let me know that her mother-in-law, Ann—a lovely, courageous woman who’s been battling cancer for several years—died early Saturday morning.

It was news I’d been expecting, but it still caught me off guard.

Sharon Olds writes about a tragedy . . . 

1954

by: Sharon Olds

Then dirt scared me, because of the dirt
he had put on her face. And her training bra
scared me—the newspapers, morning and evening,
kept saying it, training bra,
as if the cups of it had been calling
the breasts up, he buried her in it,
perhaps he had never bothered to take it
off, and they found her underpants
in a garbage can. And I feared the word
eczema, like my acne and like
the X in the paper which marked her body,
as if he had killed her for not being flawless.
I feared his name, Burton Abbott,
the first name that was a last name,
as if he were not someone specific.
It was nothing one could learn from his face.
His face was dull and ordinary,
it took away what I’d thought I could count on
about evil. He looked thin and lonely,
it was horrifying, he looked almost humble.
I felt awe that dirt was so impersonal,
and pity for the training bra,
pity and terror of eczema.
And I could not sit on my mother’s electric
blanket anymore, I began to have 
a fear of electricity—
the good people, the parents, were going
to fry him to death. This was what
his parents had been telling us:
Burton Abbott, Burton Abbott,
death to the person, death to the home planet.
The worst thing would have been to think 

of her, of what it had been to be her, 

alive, to be walked, alive, into that cabin,
to look into those eyes, and see the human.

It’s a terrible poem about an unspeakable act—the murder of a young woman.  But Olds, as always, goes underneath the unspeakable to find the speakable, the human.  She imagines what the victim went through at the end, staring into the eyes of her killer.

I think, in the face of tragedy and loss, we lose sight of the human.  Instead, we mythologize and canonize.  It happens all the time, and it’s natural, especially when it involves a loved one.  We lose sight of the whole person and focus, instead, on that person’s best qualities.  Again, as I said, it’s a natural part of the grieving process.

Ann was an incredibly loving, giving person.  In all the time I knew her, I never saw her without a smile on her face, even when she was facing her health crises.  She had a ready laugh and an even readier heart.  Love was her guiding force, always.  My family was graced by her and her husband’s generous spirits more times than I can count.

I write these things not to mythologize, as so often is the case when a person is taken at too young an age.  I write these things simply because they are true.  The world is a little dimmer tonight without Ann in it, and my heart breaks for her family, who I consider my family, too.

In honor of Ann, hug the people you cherish tonight.  Tell them how much they mean to you.  Don’t wait until it’s too late.  Ann never did.

Saint Marty wrote a poem for tonight.  It’s about the sustaining power of breath, and it’s based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:

In an abecedarian poem, every line begins with A, B, C, D, etc.  Write a mini-abecedarian poem where each word in the poem is in alphabetical order.  For example, the first line of a mini-abecedarian poem could be:  Another big cactus dies entertainingly.  Forget giving.  Help invent .  . or Autumn birds can desire eggs from groceries . . .  See if you can write an entire poem this way.  Don’t worry too much about making sense, just see what new images or lines you can invent.

All Breath

by: Martin Achatz

All breath comes down easily,

falls, goes hushed into juniper,

knobcone, locust, makes nobody

opine past questions, read sunspots

to understand various worries, 

xenial yatter, zealotry.

November 11, 2025: “For and Against Knowledge,” Veterans Day, “Uncle Shorty Never Talked About Pearl Harbor”

We are surrounded by heroes every day.

There’s the kid who goes to school every day, despite the bully who shoves him to the pavement at recess.

There’s the father who works three jobs every day to make sure his family has food and warm winter jackets and a place to call home.

There’s the teacher who stands in front of her students every day because she believes in the future.

And there’s the homeless college student who sleeps in his car in a Walmart parking lot every night and never misses a single class.

All of these people are heroes in my book.

Sharon Olds writes about a lost hero . . . 

For and Against Knowledge

(for Christa MacAuliffe)

by: Sharon Olds

What happened to her? As long as it was she,
what did she see? Strapped in,
tilted back, so her back was toward
the planet she was leaving, feeling the Gs
press her with their enormous palm, did she
weep with excitement in the roar, and in
the lens of a tear glimpse for an instant
a disc of fire? If she were our daughter,
would I think about it, how she had died, was she
torn apart, was she burned—the way
I have wondered about the first seconds
of our girl’s life, when she was a cell a
cell had just entered, she hung in me
a ball of grey liquid, without nerves,
without eyes or memory, it was
she, I love her. So I want to slow it
down, and take each millisecond
up, take her, at each point,
in my mind’s arms—the first, final
shock hit, as if God touched
a thumb to her brain and it went out, like a mercy killing,
and then, when it was no longer she,
the flames came—as we burned my father
when he had left himself. Then the massive bloom un-
buckled and jumped, she was vaporized back
down to the level of the cell. And the spirit—
I have never understood the spirit,
all I know is the shape it takes,
the wavering flame of flesh. Those
who know about the spirit may tell you
where she is, and why. What I want
to do is find every cell,
slip it out of the fishes’ mouths,
ash in the tree, soot in our eyes
where she enters our lives, I want to play it
backwards, burning jigsaw puzzle
of flesh, suck in its million stars
to meet, in the sky, boiling metal
fly back
together, and cool.
Pull that rocket
back down
surely to earth, open the hatch
and draw them out like fresh-born creatures,
sort them out, family by family, go
away, disperse, do not meet here.

Most people of a certain age will remember the day the Challenger exploded.  Those astronauts riding the elevator up to the cockpit, Christa MacAuliffe among them.  The countdown and takeoff.  And then, 73 seconds later, the heartbreak.  Like the JFK assassination or Hiroshima bombing, it is a moment that changed the world forever.

Today, the United States celebrated Veterans Day.  Originally, November 11 was Armistice Day, marking the end of World War I; in 1919, President Woodrow Wilson made it a day of commemoration for all veterans of the Great War.  Then, in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a bill that officially turned November 11 into Veterans Day, honoring all who have served in the U.S. military, war or peacetime.

I spent this Veterans Day at the library for an annual employee inservice.  Lots of presentations and activities.  But, at the beginning of the day, the director of the library acknowledged employees who served in the military.  (There were two.)  

Most military veterans I know don’t really speak about their times in the service.  My dad never talked about his time in the army during the Korean War.  My Uncle Larry never discussed his military service in Korea either.  I’ve taught Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.  Several of them wrote about their experiences for assignments, but I can't recall a single conversation with any of them about their time in the military.

Heroes are quiet.  They don't do what they do for recognition or medals.  Usually, they feel uncomfortable in the spotlight.  If asked, they usually say something along the lines of "I was just doing my job" or "I was just doing what I had to do."  

So, today, I salute all military veterans and unsung heroes out there.  I am grateful for how they made/make this world a better place, day after day.

Saint Marty wrote a poem for this Veterans Day, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:

In honor of Veterans Day, write a poem to or about a veteran.  To avoid falling into cliche, write about a veteran doing something completely normal--grocery shopping or pumping gas.  Aim to show something about this veteran without mentioning war, guns, or a bombing.

Uncle Shorty Never Talked About Pearl Harbor

by: Martin Achatz

He talked about carrots he grew

in his garden every summer,

fat and sweet as apples, or

about his son with CP who

smoked cigarettes in a long

Cruella de Vil holder and stomped

his feet with laughter when

someone told him a dirty joke, or

about Aunt Tillie's lemon bars

she brought to every family

shindig involving food (and they

all involved food).  But when

I returned from Honolulu, mentioned

standing on the Arizona Memorial,

staring down at the wreckage below,

Uncle Shorty just nodded, looked off

at his rows of tomatoes and peppers,

his lips moving in silence, as if

saying the names of buddies he lost

December 7.  Pudge.  Junior.  Piehole.

Alfalfa. Sweeney.  Little John.

The green beans hadn't done well,

he noticed.  Not enough rain.