February 29: "Random," Leap Day, Control Freak

Billy Collins plays darts . . . 

Random

by:  Billy Collins

Tossing a dart

at an open encyclopedia,

I happen to hit a flying squirrel.

Their kind, the entry explains,

as I close in,

are seldom seen

due to their nocturnal habits

and high dwelling places.

So much there to admire!

It isn't easy to find something interesting to write about on a daily basis.  It often feels like throwing darts at an open encyclopedia, as Collins does in this poem.  He ends up writing about flying squirrels.  Tonight, my dart has landed on leap day.  

In my time on this planet, I have lived through 14 leap days.  (Yes, you can now figure out how old I am, which is right between "ouch" and "boing!")  I know some people who take this gift of extra time very seriously.  They make a point of leaping every February 29th--doing something they have never done before.  Sky diving.  Oil painting.  Cake decorating.  Distance running.  Poetry writing.  

I've never really taken a leap of faith like that, and I'm not about to start today.  I'm a creature of habit and routine.  Purposely upsetting the applecart of my life is not a practice I enjoy.  Perhaps its a matter of control.  Translation:  I'm a control freak.  I eat the same breakfast every day.  (I'm also an insulin-dependent diabetic, so that helps me control my blood sugars.)  I watch the same movie for weeks on end.  Read the same poems over and over and over.  Know what I'm having for dinner tomorrow night and the night after that.

About the only leap I will make today is into my pajamas.  I've reached the age where a good night is sitting on my couch in my PJs, eating a bowl of Special K, and watching Netflix.  I'm still a night owl.  Have been most of my life.  Falling asleep before 1 a.m.--now that would be a leap for me.

I have friends who do crazy shit all the time--ski jumping, ultramarathoning, voting for Donald Trump.  Perhaps those same friends think that writing poetry is crazy shit.  Maybe it's all relative--one person's leap is another person's everyday.

Saint Marty hopes the next time he throws his dart at an encyclopedia it lands on "nap."

February 28: "Seashore," Best Foot, Driver's Training

Billy Collins watches a bird . . . 

Seashore

by:  Billy Collins

A banded

Piping Plover

puts its best foot forward

then the other.

Piping Plovers are amazing to watch on a beach, running toward the sea, running away from the sea, like kids playing tag on a school playground.  They're feathered puffs of confidence and fear, stepping forward, then retreating.

Like Collins' Piping Plover, I always try to put my best foot forward.  My mantra for most of my life has been "Go big or go home."  If I'm going to succeed, I'm going to succeed spectacularly.  If I'm going to fail, I will do so spectacularly, as well.  Either way, people are going to take notice.

I've had my share of successes, and I've fallen on my face a lot, too.  Of course, that describes most people's lives.  Humans can do amazing things like discover penicillin.  Humans can also fuck things up majorly, as well.  Ask the next polar bear you see swimming from ice floe to ice floe.  Landing on the moon.  Success.  Chernobyl.  Disaster.  You get the idea.

My son started his driver's training class at school a few days ago.  We went to the orientation session for parents and students.  We listened to all of the steps involved in obtaining a Michigan driver's license.  It's not like the good old days when I learned to drive.  For me, I sat in a classroom after school for about a week, took a multiple choice test, drove for a week with an instructor and two other wannabe drivers, and then went to the local Secretary of State office and got my license.  Bada boom bada bing, and I was driving a car.  And all of that was free.

My son's path to driving is much more complicated and much more expensive.  I could tell, watching him at the meeting, that he was really nervous, although he was trying to play it cool.  He didn't know any of the other student drivers, and he was in an unfamiliar school setting.  Plus, he's going to be getting homework.  A lot of it.  Watching him was sort of like watching a banded Piping Plover chasing and fleeing from waves on a seashore.  He was equally confident and terrified.  

I know my son will succeed.  He's smart and funny.  Plus, he knows how much money I paid for him to take this class.  But, he's also very young and unsure of himself.  Basically, a typical teenager, facing a world that's both comfortably familiar and wildly strange.  My job right now is to teach him how to navigate the choppy waters toward adulthood.  

I think most adults forget how difficult being a teenager is.  Sure, young people seem to have more freedom and less responsibility.  Yes, going to school sounds so much easier than punching a time clock and working eight, nine, or ten hours a day.  However, throw into that mix raging hormones and little-to-no impulse control, and you have the recipe for panic attacks and depression.

I love my son.  Like any father, I want him to succeed at everything he does.  However, I know that falling can be just as instructive as running like the wind.  

Win or lose, Saint Marty will always be there for him, whether he's putting his best foot forward or taking three hundred steps back.

February 25: "Thelonious Morning," Beautiful and Sad, Billie Holiday

Billy Collins enjoys some jazz at dawn . . . 

Thelonious Morning

by:  Billy Collins

The breeze was slight

and moved only three

of the six wind chimes, 

which formed a minor chord.

I have Thelonious mornings, when something beautiful and sad exist at the same time.  It could be a crow scraping the air raw with its scream, like Charlie Parker hitting squealing high notes.  Or the sun slowly rhapsodizing clouds from purple to orange to gold at a February daybreak.  Or just the knuckle and bebop of snow under my boots as my dog takes a shit in the backyard.

Jazz is all around, making morning into mourning, evening into elegy.  I'm often awake well into night, open my eyes well before dawn.  So I hear solitary cars gliding down midnight streets and my dog howling softly as she chases the moon in her dreams.  I try to sleep, but my mind doesn't cooperate.  It prefers the company of starlight and skunks and owls.

As I type these words, my house (and everyone in it) is deep breathing its way to tomorrow.  Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.  I'm tired, but not enough to be exhausted.  Cleaned my house today.  Hosted members of my book club for our monthly conversation.  Spent a few hours grading papers.  Read some.  Scribbled in my journal some.

In these winter doldrums (got that from a good friend who correctly diagnosed my current state of mind), I struggle with motivation and inspiration.  I'm at low tide, and all I can do is sit and stare at a universe of fallen starfish littering the sand.

Don't look for any kind of deep meaning or wisdom from me in this post.  Instead, press the conch shell of night to your ear and listen.

Let Saint Marty know if you hear the sea or Billie Holiday singing "Strange Fruit."

February 24: "Used Book," Perpetually Tired, Back in the Saddle

Billy Collins reading a . . .

Used Book

by:  Billy Collins

I turn a page

someone dog-eared,

like the bent ear

of a dog who's still lost.

Yes, I have been absent for quite a while.  I know that.  I'd like to say that I've been putting the finishing touches on a novel or collection of poems (I've been doing a little of the latter).  But that's not the reason.  I could claim sickness, but that's not the reason, either.  Teaching?  Nope.  Planning the Great Lakes Poetry Festival for the library where I work?  A little.  Working as an undercover poet for President Biden writing limericks about his predecessor?  Sounds like fun, but no.

The truth of the matter is that I've been tired.  Perpetually tired.  I usually write these blog posts either very early in the morning (when everyone in my house is still asleep) or very late at night (when everyone in my house has gone to bed).  However, my writing impulses have been running on low battery for the last month or so, and all I want to do is . . . sleep.  And once you fall out of a routine, it's hard to pick it up again.

People don't realize the energy it takes to write.  There are constant distractions--laundry to fold, papers to grade, a book to finish, a movie or TV show to watch.  Being able to set all that aside takes willpower and determination.  (Notice I didn't say "inspiration."  If I always waited to be inspired before I pick up a pen to write, I would never write again.)  Writing is plain hard work.

What have I been doing instead or writing?  Well, I've been rereading some of my favorite books and poetry collections.  Books that I've scribbled marginalia in, dog-eared pages of, and memorized passages from.  Old friends.  Collins compares the bent pages of well-loved books to the bent ear of a lost dog.  We're both saying the same thing--the words and pages of used books are comforting in times of chaos and upheaval and exhaustion.

I'm going to try to get back into the writing saddle.  No guarantees what I produce will be profound or funny or even interesting.  The next post I write may simply be my grocery list or a catalogue of Sharon Olds' books on my bookshelf (there are a lot).  But Rome wasn't built in a day, and runners don't start with marathons.  (Apologies for the clichés.  It's the best I can do at the moment.)

So, this lost dog is back home, and hopefully you will be reading a lot more of the Gospel of Saint Marty in the coming days.

 

February 18: "Night Sky," Star Watcher, Wonder and Beauty

Billy Collins stargazes . . .

Night Sky

by:  Billy Collins

Lying on the beach

after so much wine and talk--

dippers everywhere.

I've been a star watcher most of my life.  From a very young age, I had a subscription to Astronomy magazine, each month losing my mind over all of the beautiful images of stars and planets and galaxies in its pages (although, compared to the images now available from the Webb Telescope, those pictures now seem like petroglyphs on cave walls).  Many a night I spent with my eyes pointed heavenward.

I sometimes thought I would become an astronomer or physicist.  That's how much I loved gazing through my telescope.  Of course, I didn't turn out to be the next Carl Sagan.  Many of my friends and family would say that my head is still in the clouds, but I'm chasing poems instead of comets now.

Not many stars are visible tonight.  For the past week, it's been pretty gray and snowy.  My daughter came over for dinner a couple nights ago, and we watched a couple episodes of The Crown together.  I remember summer nights with her when she was younger, watching for passing satellites and Perseid showers and lunar eclipses in our backyard.  When Neowise showed up a few years ago, she climbed Sugarloaf Mountain with me in the dark to see the comet from the summit.   

I don't think I'll ever outgrow my childhood fascination with astronomy.  Looking into the heavens is like time traveling:  all the light we see is between 4,000 and 70,000 years old.  Truly a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.  (Yes, astronomy also fostered my love of science fiction, as well.)  That means that, when you see some stars in the night sky, what you are seeing is light that originated at a time when Earth was going through an Ice Age due to the super eruption of the Toba Volcano.  That extinction event left only about 5000 human ancestors alive on the entire planet.  Everyone living now is descended from those 5000.  That blows my mind.

My knowledge of astronomy is rudimentary, at best.  I can't identify all the constellations spinning above me.  However, I can name all the planets.  I know that we are part of the Milky Way.  I also know that Earth is about 93 million miles away from the Sun.  Like I said, rudimentary knowledge.

But Saint Marty is all about chasing wonder and beauty each and every day.  

February 15: "Reflections on an Amish Chidlhood," Trauma Recovery Poetry Workshop, Riddikulus

Another Billy Collins joke . . . 

Reflections on an Amish Childhood

by:  Billy Collins

I was a little square

in a round hat.

As I've said before, Collins gets himself in trouble with poems like this one.  It's a dad joke in disguise.  Smart with great wordplay.  I actually laughed out loud when I first read it.  There's nothing very deep or revelatory in it.  Collins is simply having fun, and I think the world could do with a little more fun and a little less hand-wringing.

For the past two days, I've attended a trauma-recovery writing workshop led by a good friend of mine.  Now, I'm sure that doesn't sound appealing to a lot of my faithful disciples.  It was VERY heavy at times, touching upon personal stories of sustained loss and abuse.  However, there were also moments of beauty, laughter, and intense connection.  

It's not my place to share any of the details of the workshop because most of those details belong to other people.  Yet, I will say that humor is one way that individuals cope with ongoing trauma and trauma recovery.  It's either that or you curl into a fetal position and never get out of bed.  

And, of course, there's always writing.  Dealing with the large, hairy, and difficult things in life can be overwhelming.  Because they are so large and so hairy and so difficult.  However, writing can provide a feeling of control somehow.  It's sort of like caging a wild animal.  A lion running free can pretty much do anything it wants--stalk, hunt, roar, attack, kill.  A lion in a cage is controlled; it can't harm anyone or anything.

The same is true of traumatic experiences.  If they are free and wild, they can fuck you up, over and over and over.  However, if they are written down, described, anatomized, those experiences lose some of their power.  Because they are contained in words and sentences and paragraphs on a piece of paper.  Imagine the lines on the paper as the bars of a cage.  The trauma can charge or howl or fling itself against those bars, but it can't harm you in any way.  It's controlled.

That's what we did in my friend's writing workshop--we talked about trauma and wrote about trauma, thereby rendering it a little less powerful, a little more manageable.  We also laughed a lot, which, as I said, is another way of weakening the hold of trauma (sort of like using a Riddikulus spell against a Boggart in the Harry Potter universe).

So laugh.  Share.  Write.  Enter the mansion of trauma through the front door or sneak in through the back door, as my friend said in the workshop.

Saint Marty has always believed that reading poetry, listening to poetry, writing poetry can be healing in many ways.  The last two days has proven it to him.

A poem written during the workshop:

Cough

by:  Martin Achatz

I tell my five-year-old daughter

 to do it into her elbow, So you don't

make anybody sick, I say.

She nods as if she's just received

the 11th commandment from God:

"Thou shalt not cough into air

and spread thy germs."  She gets

it without knowing the mechanics

of biology and microbes and

contagion.  For all she knows, she's

trapping some pixie that lives

inside her and is trying to escape, 

become some rogue piece of magic

flitting, flurrying around from body

to body, creating new constellations--

one person, a nose; another, an antler

tip; the person across from her, a dolphin

dorsal.  She thinks of her universe like this,

a web of starry connections without design,

each new person brimming with panache,

cells colliding into wonder, breaths

and griefs and laughters coalescing

into something that can't be mapped

or contained.  She gets all of that

in an instant because she trusts without

me having to explain why:  why

water is blue, why her grandma

can't remember her name, why

she has to wash her hands before

she eats.  She shouldn't trust

so easily.  The world is full

of shocks and earthquakes, sharp teeth

that sink into your arm and won't let go.

Don't do it, I want to shout, drive 

into her ears, her DNA.  People 

will hurt you, over and over.

Maybe these words, this direction 

about coughing will save her,

as every father wants to save 

his child, from the bright gala

of heartbreak that is this world.  

She turns her head, coughs 

into the crook of her arm,

then smiles at me.  I feel 

myself breaking open, 

a germ of hope and sadness

taking root, spreading, infecting

my heart's fragile immune system.

February 14: "Pupil," Ash Wednesday, "an ode to patience"

Billy Collins meditates on flowers, eyes, and students . . . 

Pupil

by:  Billy Collins

A hole in the eye,

the black well in the middle

of a flower, an iris,

or she who gives you the eye

sidelong on her way

out of the classroom, after the others.

This poem is all about seeing.  In an eye, the pupil is an opening that passes light through the lens.  For an iris, it's where the purple petals gather at the center--a "black well" where light gets eaten.  And, in school, it's the student who glances furtively around as she leaves the room after her classmates, perhaps in a state of enlightenment, confusion, or somewhere in between.   One poem.  Three different pupils.  Light.  Darkness.

Today is Valentine's Day.  It's also Ash Wednesday.  The last time these two celebrations occurred on the same day was in 2018, six days after my father died.  And there it is again:  light and darkness together.  Somehow, this pairing seems appropriate.  I mean, all great love eventually results in great grief.  Think about it.  If you truly love someone, you've set yourself up for heartbreak.  Inevitably, there will be a cleaving because of desertion, divorce, or death.  No way 'round it.  

Me?  I have so much love in my life--people who care about me deeply.  I'm a lucky guy.  I'm not sure I deserve all of the love I receive.  There're many things about me that aren't all that lovable.  Yet, I try to be a good person.  Treat everyone I meet with compassion and respect, even individuals who seem to be in my life simply to test my patience.  And perhaps I'm the pebble in someone's shoe, as well.

I once spent an entire Lenten season praying for people who had hurt me in some way.  I'm not talking about a thirty-second "Hail Mary."  No, it was more like an hour of meditation, forgiveness, and atonement.  Some days, this practice would literally make me physically ill.  Other days, I would feel like a kite dancing in the clouds.  Ash Wednesday and Saint Valentine's Day.  Dark and light.

Saint Marty wishes all of his disciples patience and love.

an ode to patience

after Ross Gay

by:  Martin Achatz

I include "an" in the title

because this poem is not

the ode to patience, not

a culmination of a lifelong

study, more like a stab at it, 

the way as a kid in Biology

I stabbed oak leaves or moth

wings onto cream-colored

paper, labeled them with their

common names and their Latin

family names for my Museum

of Natural Patience filled 

with sixth-grade notes to sixth-

grade crushes, the smell of my

mother's bread baking in the oven,

the wash of breaths from my sister's

lungs as she was dying, the watery

cannon fire of my son's heart

in my wife's belly, telling me

wait, wait, wait, wait because

the best is yet to come.

February 10: "The Sociologist," Multifaceted, Diamond

Billy Collins doesn't take himself too seriously . . . 

The Sociologist

by:  Billy Collins

I wandered lonely as a crowd.

Okay, if you are a poetry geek, like me, that is a funny poem.  (If you don't get it, check out William Wordsworth's famous poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.")  This poem is the kind that gets Collins in trouble with the poetry intelligentsia (AKA snobs).  It's light and fun and smart.  It's a dad joke in poetic form.  Don't get me wrong.  Collins is a serious poet, for sure.  He's served as U. S. Poet Laureate and New York State Poet in the past, and his collections frequently become bestsellers.  (Perhaps there's a little jealousy going on with the "starving" poets out there?)  Whatever the reason, in some poetic company, Billy Collins is He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.

Perhaps that's the reason I like Billy Collins so much.  I don't care for people with inflated egos who have to look down on others to make themselves feel better.  (In 2016, we elected a President of the United States who excelled at this, and look where it got us.)  So, if you're reading this post and thinking, "Well, Collins sure isn't Kwame Dawes or Joy Harjo," that is true.  The world already has a Kwame Dawes and Joy Harjo.  We don't need another.  Just like we don't need another Ernest Hemingway or Pablo Picasso or Jesus Christ.

Simply dismissing Billy Collins because he doesn't mind poking fun at himself and others, making his readers laugh, is the height of hubris.  Humor is a part of who Collins is, just as, I'm sure, heartbreak and love are.  To ignore Collins for being who he is (funny and intelligent) would be like ignoring Martin Luther King, Jr., for talking about racial equality and God all the time.  Or Leonard Cohen for always writing complex, jaded, deeply melancholic songs.  Or me for writing blog posts and poems constantly.  

Every person is a diamond, multifaceted--dark AND bright, joyful AND grief-stricken, normal AND incredibly weird.  Only my closest friends and family members encounter more than one or two of my facets.  I've been absent from blogging for about two weeks now.  If you've been wondering why, I will give you my pat answer:  I've been too busy.  The truth is a little more complicated than that, involving sadness and disappointment and exhaustion and, yes, busyness, too.  But, in a society that thrives on 30-second TikTok videos, no one wants to spend time and effort to really learn the truth.

Last night, I played music for a friend's funeral--a lovely woman who, judging by how many people attended her funeral, was incredibly loved and cherished.  During the service, the pastor spoke of how everyone in attendance had different stories and memories of her--happy and sad memories, private and public memories, maybe even angry and disappointed memories.  Because that's what the human animal is--a messy conglomeration of experiences and emotions.  It's easy to love someone who's happy-go-lucky and fun.  But it's harder, and (I would argue) more rewarding, to embrace the broken soul and make it whole again.  Even though my friend is gone, she is still teaching important lessons to the people who knew her and loved her.

So, if you're reading this post and there's someone in your life who's upset or angered you, remember that you're probably focusing on just one facet of that person:  the facet that, for some reason, has caused heartbreak and estrangement.  If you want to throw a diamond away because of one scratched side, you will lose something precious and beautiful.

Saint Marty doesn't want to wander lonely as a cloud (or crowd) for the rest of his life.