Blackberries
by: Mary Oliver
I come down.
Come down the blacktop from Red Rock.
A hot day.
Off the road in the hacked tangles
blackberries big as thumbs hang shining
in the shade. And a creek nearby: a dark
spit through wet stones. And a pool
like a stonesink if you know
where to climb for it among
the hillside ferns, where the thrush
naps in her nest of sticks and loam. I
come down from Red Rock, lips streaked
black, fingers purple, throat cool. shirt
full of fernfingers, head full of windy
whistling. It
takes all day.
It has been a long day. Drove home from Calumet this morning. Didn't see any blackberries along the highway, but autumn colors were in full blaze.
Tonight, I attended the 2023 Marquette Art Awards, where I was presented with the Writer of the Year recognition. It was an inspiring night, full of friends and artists and performers (including a poetry reading from me). Some of my favorite people were in my cheering section.
It's late now, and I'm pretty exhausted. However, I wanted to share something from tonight's awards ceremony.
Below is Saint Marty's acceptance speech and the poem he read this evening . . .
Acceptance Speech:
My story begins on a farm in downstate Michigan, where my father skated through manure, fed chickens, vowed he wouldn’t spend the rest of his life pitching hay. And in a house not far from the St. Clair River and auto factories of Detroit, where my six-year-old mother spoon-fed potato soup to her father dying of stomach cancer.
Of course, beginnings aren’t really beginnings. I stand here tonight on the shoulders of a whole clan of greats, great-greats, great-great-greats who looked across the Atlantic and saw something better, a life of promise in houses, villages, cities, towns built on stolen lands on the backs of stolen people.
I am a plumber’s son from a plumber’s family. In my five-plus decades of breath, I have carried that label as honorific, as badge to my working-class roots, the hard-as-cement hands of my father, brothers, and sisters.
I am a plumber’s son told by two mentors—Drs. Raymond Ventre and Ron Johnson—that I needed to study and write, needed to cast my net further and further out, where shadows of whales swim
I am a plumber’s son who, one afternoon in the office of his Cajon conjurer, writer, teacher, friend, Dr. Beverly Matherne, heard her make this pronouncement like an eleventh commandment: “You are a poet.”
I am a plumber’s son surrounded by a multitude of shades, people, breathing and breathed, who have held my hand, guided me like Virgil through the circles of this poetic life. Helen Haskell Remien, comet of joy, who still burns bright in so many of heaven’s hearts. Janeen Pergrin Rastall, for teaching me to laugh loud and long and hard in order to keep darkness at bay. So many names—B.G., Gala, Ronnie, Christine, Rosalie, Roslyn, Lynn, Gail, Esther, Milt—that to say them all would take an encyclopedia, a Wikipedia of time.
I am a plumber’s son who bows before the great gardeners of art in this city on Superior—Tiina, Amelia, and Tristan.
I am a plumber’s son blessed by a partner who has never asked me to be anything but a poet, by a son and daughter who have been served syllables and words for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and never wanted peanut butter and jelly instead.
I am a plumber’s son whose plumber father, six months before he became moment and memory, came to a poetry reading and introduced himself to a stranger thusly: “I am the poet’s father.”
I am a plumber’s son now reduced to just two syllables, two bites of air, two breaths: “Thank you.”
Poem:
Growth Triptych
by: Martin Achatz
by: Martin Achatz
October 15, 2023
1. The Art of Growth
A coworker carries her granddaughter
around the office, showing off
her dark curls and serious eyes.
I am amazed how much the child
has grown, size her up
like a blue-ribbon squash.
The last time I saw her,
she fit into the fold of my arm,
a mitten of sleep. Now,
in this thick June, she is
all height and weight, a moving
field of sprout and fruit.
My coworker knows the art of growth,
the moisture and heat it needs,
the cycles of sowing and reaping.
With her daughter, she kneads manure
into black earth, thick with cow smell,
watches her granddaughter plow
dirt with her fingers.
I wonder if she is ever astonished
by the size of her roses,
the yellow of her daylilies.
I wonder if she ever listens
to her garden at night,
the way I used to listen to my daughter
stretch and grow in the dark.
2. In the Garden
I can put my fist in the hole
in my sister’s flank, see rib
white against slick muscle.
When she sleeps, her body cries
for healthy blood and skin and scar.
I sit beside her hospital bed, listen
to her breaths, wonder if she dreams
of dog bites, sharp glass,
the thick kiss of a dead love.
The man down the hall moans
“Clara” in the dark,
a two-syllable prayer
for deep winter, pine cones,
cool fingers on his naked back.
My sister’s hand flutters on the sheet.
I touch her wrist, trace the blue veins
under the skin. Her face smooths
like a snowdrift, and I see
the pulse leap in her temple,
nostrils black with air,
eyes vagrant beneath their lids.
Her wound has not healed for two years,
and I joke she has stigmata like Padre Pio,
beg her to touch my head, bless me.
She laughs, crosses the air.
When the priest visits her, my sister says,
“I feel like someone forgot to bury me.”
He anoints her forehead, hands, and feet.
During her next dressing change,
my sister grips the rails of the bed,
bites her lip until it bruises, splits
The nurse examines the discharge,
smells the wound for infection, then leaves.
My sister cradles her stomach, as if afraid
her heart may spill onto the floor.
Pio’s wounds smelled of violets,
the petals of his fingers raising
full-moon hosts to heaven
during mass, roses blooming
on the snow of his bandages.
He bled all day, enough to fill
a chalice to its golden lip,
For five decades, he nursed
the stigmata like fragile orchids
rooted in his body’s soil.
At night, in his cell, he stripped
his dressings, allowed his suffering
to breathe the dark air, nerve endings
sparking in his ragged skin
like fireflies in tall grass.
In the few hours he slept,
his body opened, unfurled
the deep ovule of his pain
until the floor, walls, ceiling
blossomed with his bruised fragrance.
Tonight, my sister rests.
The IV fills her, the way rain fills
a summer garden. She holds
her side, blooms in her bed,
a fresh and open miracle.
3. Genesis
In seven days, what can I
create? If I open my lips,
can I speak something to life—
a charm of hummingbirds, flood
of dolphins, riot of Queen
Anne’s lace in an August
culvert? If I say Let there be
poem, will green shoots
press through soil, rise
against the soles of my feet,
stretch vermillion toward
sun and cloud and blue,
petals singing thanks
to the wild, wild universe?
Did you ever think God
has been revising us
since he first scribbled our names
in the fields of his journal?
Maybe God is Walt Whitman,
adding, subtracting, hoeing,
watering, pruning, harvesting.
Maybe Eden is the borning
breath my daughter suckled,
or the last breath my sister
held in her lungs. Maybe
we’re all apples just waiting
to be plucked and eaten
by someone who wants
to taste how sweet this world
really is.
1. The Art of Growth
A coworker carries her granddaughter
around the office, showing off
her dark curls and serious eyes.
I am amazed how much the child
has grown, size her up
like a blue-ribbon squash.
The last time I saw her,
she fit into the fold of my arm,
a mitten of sleep. Now,
in this thick June, she is
all height and weight, a moving
field of sprout and fruit.
My coworker knows the art of growth,
the moisture and heat it needs,
the cycles of sowing and reaping.
With her daughter, she kneads manure
into black earth, thick with cow smell,
watches her granddaughter plow
dirt with her fingers.
I wonder if she is ever astonished
by the size of her roses,
the yellow of her daylilies.
I wonder if she ever listens
to her garden at night,
the way I used to listen to my daughter
stretch and grow in the dark.
2. In the Garden
I can put my fist in the hole
in my sister’s flank, see rib
white against slick muscle.
When she sleeps, her body cries
for healthy blood and skin and scar.
I sit beside her hospital bed, listen
to her breaths, wonder if she dreams
of dog bites, sharp glass,
the thick kiss of a dead love.
The man down the hall moans
“Clara” in the dark,
a two-syllable prayer
for deep winter, pine cones,
cool fingers on his naked back.
My sister’s hand flutters on the sheet.
I touch her wrist, trace the blue veins
under the skin. Her face smooths
like a snowdrift, and I see
the pulse leap in her temple,
nostrils black with air,
eyes vagrant beneath their lids.
Her wound has not healed for two years,
and I joke she has stigmata like Padre Pio,
beg her to touch my head, bless me.
She laughs, crosses the air.
When the priest visits her, my sister says,
“I feel like someone forgot to bury me.”
He anoints her forehead, hands, and feet.
During her next dressing change,
my sister grips the rails of the bed,
bites her lip until it bruises, splits
The nurse examines the discharge,
smells the wound for infection, then leaves.
My sister cradles her stomach, as if afraid
her heart may spill onto the floor.
Pio’s wounds smelled of violets,
the petals of his fingers raising
full-moon hosts to heaven
during mass, roses blooming
on the snow of his bandages.
He bled all day, enough to fill
a chalice to its golden lip,
For five decades, he nursed
the stigmata like fragile orchids
rooted in his body’s soil.
At night, in his cell, he stripped
his dressings, allowed his suffering
to breathe the dark air, nerve endings
sparking in his ragged skin
like fireflies in tall grass.
In the few hours he slept,
his body opened, unfurled
the deep ovule of his pain
until the floor, walls, ceiling
blossomed with his bruised fragrance.
Tonight, my sister rests.
The IV fills her, the way rain fills
a summer garden. She holds
her side, blooms in her bed,
a fresh and open miracle.
3. Genesis
In seven days, what can I
create? If I open my lips,
can I speak something to life—
a charm of hummingbirds, flood
of dolphins, riot of Queen
Anne’s lace in an August
culvert? If I say Let there be
poem, will green shoots
press through soil, rise
against the soles of my feet,
stretch vermillion toward
sun and cloud and blue,
petals singing thanks
to the wild, wild universe?
Did you ever think God
has been revising us
since he first scribbled our names
in the fields of his journal?
Maybe God is Walt Whitman,
adding, subtracting, hoeing,
watering, pruning, harvesting.
Maybe Eden is the borning
breath my daughter suckled,
or the last breath my sister
held in her lungs. Maybe
we’re all apples just waiting
to be plucked and eaten
by someone who wants
to taste how sweet this world
really is.
❤️
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