September 17, 2025: “Full Summer,” Road Trip, “Reflections on Water, or My Brother Tried to Drown Me”

Yes, it has been quite a while since I’ve posted.  

I’d like to say that I’ve been busy or sick or traveling or protesting.  Of course, I’ve been swamped with teaching and library events.  I’m just trying to settle into my fall schedule.  No colds or flus, and no roadtrips.  And every day of my life is an act of protest—because I try to be kind and understanding and compassionate to everyone.  (I know that’s a revolutionary in this country at this time.)  My excuse (whether legitimate or not):  I’ve been exhausted every night I’ve gotten home.

Summer is definitely coming to an end.  The maple trees on my property have already begin changing color.  We’ve already had a few nights when the furnace kicked in.  But no frost warnings, yet.  Schools are back in session, and the sun is setting before 8:30 p.m. these days.  Yet, I’m not ready to surrender to autumn and winter just yet.  I am a summer holdout.

Sharon Olds writes about the good ol’ summertime . . . 

Full Summer

by: Sharon Olds

I paused, and paused, over your body,

to feel the current of desire pull

and pull through me.  Our hair was still wet,

mine like a knotted wrack, it fell

across you as I paused, a soaked coil

around your glans.  When one of your hairs

dried, it lifted a bare nerve.

On the beach, above us, a cloud had appeared in

the clear air, a clockwise loop coming

in out of nothing, now the skin of your scrotum

moved like a live being, an animal,

I began to lick you, the foreskin lightly

stuck in one spot, like a petal, I love

to free it—just so—in joy,

and to sip from the little crying lips

at the tip.  Then there was no more pausing,

nor was this the taker,

some new one came

and sucked, and up from where I had been hiding I was

drawn in a heavy spiral out of matter

over into another world

I had thought I would have to die to reach.

This is prime Sharon Olds material:  sex, summer, sun.  It’s like an Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon beach blanket blowjob movie.  There’s something sexily nostalgic in her poem.  Even though she’s an adult, married woman in the poem, her words bring me back to my teenage summers.  That coming-of-age time.

 Well, it has been really warm these last five days, and today was no different.  It has been hitting the 80s since about last Saturday.  Tomorrow, my son and I care going on a road trip.  It was supposed to be my whole family going, but my wife tested positive for COVID on Monday, and then she had a little fender-bender with a UPS truck (no damage that I’m willing to claim with insurance).  Today, when my wife was taking our puppy for a walk around the block, a neighbor’s German shepherd attacked her.  The good news is that, thanks to my wife’s quick actions, the neighbor’s dog wasn’t able to do as much damage as the last time our puppy was attacked.  We did file a police report and took our dog to the vet.  The vet examined her and found a deep puncture on her right back leg.  

The itinerary for this weekend’s trip has changed drastically.  My wife and puppy are staying home.  My son and I are driving downstate.  We are staying in Mount Pleasant where my daughter is attending medical school, but we aren’t going to meet up with her because she’s got a final exam next Monday and doesn’t want to take the chance of catching COVID.

So, basically, my son and I are going to stay at an Airbnb by ourselves and try to find a way to amuse ourselves.  I actually planned an extra day in Mount Pleasant to have more time with my daughter, but fate had other plans.  It’s feels like a summer vacation gone terribly wrong—I’m Clark Griswold from the U.P. of Michigan.

A couple days ago, Saint Marty wrote a poem in a writing workshop led by a good friend of his.  (His friend called it a flash lyric essay.). Whether essay or poem, it has nothing to do with COVID or dog attacks.  Or summer, for that matter.

Reflections on Water, or My Brother Tried to Drown Me

by: Martin Achatz

I should have enjoyed the mist making my child face drip like an apple in the IGA produce section.

Fish.  I smelled fish, tasted fish in my mouth.  Waves applauded with foam hands, the thug-thug-thug of the ferry’s engine slapping the day awake.

I never liked fish sticks as a kid, begged my mom for grilled cheese when she brought a pan of Mrs. Paul’s to the dinner table.

Maybe I choked on amniotic fluid as I emerged from my mother or swallowed soapy liquid while being bathed as a baby or found a drowned mouse in a toilet bowl.

Yes, I’ve always associated water with death, so I avoid wading or floating or swimming, hold myself to the riverbank or shoreline, afraid I’ll untether and just drift away.

When rain baptizes the world, I think I hear the pine trees sob.

September 4, 2025: “This Hour,” Longest Weeks, “”Mars, or How to Save a Dying Planet”

Even though Monday was Labor Day and it’s a four-day workweek and nothing catastrophic happened (unless you count President 47 still being alive), this has been one of the longest weeks in recent memory.  The only thing that has saved me from going completely Howard Hughes (locking myself away in a room, not showering or cutting my hair and nails, and pissing in empty Coke bottles) are walks with my wife, car rides with my son (to and from school), and text messages from my daughter (she took her first midterm exam in medical school and killed it).

Sharon Olds shares a moment of love . . . 

This Hour

by: Sharon Olds

We could never really say what it is like,
this hour of drinking wine together
on a hot summer night, in the living room
with the windows open, in our underwear,

my pants with pale-gold gibbon monkeys on them

gleaming in the heat.  We talk about our son disap-

pearling between the pine boughs, 

we could not tell what was chrysalis or 

bough and what was him.  The wine 

is powerful, each mouthful holds

for a moment its amber agate shape, 

I think of the sweat I sipped from my father’s 

forehead the hour before his death.  We talk about 

those last days—that I was waiting for him to die.
You are lying on the couch, your underpants 

a luminous white, your hand resting
relaxed, along the side of your penis, 

we talk about your father’s illness, 

your nipple like a pure circle of 

something risen to the surface of your chest.

Even if we wanted to
we could not describe it,
the end of the second glass when I sometimes
weep and you start to get sleepy—I love 

to drink and cry with you, and end up
sobbing to a sleeping man, your
long body filling the couch and
draped slightly over the ends, the
untrained soft singing of your snore, it cannot be given.
Yes we know we will make love, but we’re
not getting ready to make love,
nor are we getting over making love, 

love is simply our element, 

it is the summer night, we are in it.

I really love the penultimate line in this poem:  “love is simply our element.”  Olds gets it right.  She and her partner know each other so intimately that simply being in each other’s presence is enough to assuage  her grieving heart.

There is a great deal of comfort in a long-term, loving relationship.  My wife and I will be celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary this year.  We were together for about five years before we got married.  Doing the math, that’s 35+ years of love and support.  We’ve had some hiccups, bumps, and derailments in that time, but, as Olds says, love is simply our element.

Tonight, we had grilled cheese sandwiches and soup for dinner.  As we ate, we watched a couple episode of Schitt’s Creek.  Then we took our puppy for a trot around the block.  The weather has taken a turn, so my wife wore her winter coat on our little hike.  (I refuse to put on my winter gear until after Thanksgiving, so I just wore three layers of shirts and sweatshirts and hoodies.). It is definitely not summer anymore.

I’m avoiding getting all sentimental here.  The last couple months have been pretty stressful, with our daughter moving downstate, our son starting his senior year in high school, and my wife losing her job.  I don’t think I’ve fully recovered from all the upheaval.  All of my faithful disciples know how well I deal with change of any kind, and the changes have been coming at light speed recently.

Thank goodness my life is filled with people (friends and family) I love and who love me.  I don’t think I would have survived the last 40 or so days without having shoulders to cry on and ears to vent to.  Recently, I have found myself crying at night after the rest of household has gone to bed.  Not every night, but at least once or twice a week.  

I don’t think I’m sliding into one of my blue periods.  (My faithful disciples may recall I had quite a bad time starting November, and it lasted several months.). I’ve been monitoring the frequency and duration of these current “down” times; I really don’t want to end up in the same space again, especially with the weather turning and daylight shrinking.  

Again, what saved me last November was the love of my family and friends, especially my wife and kids.  Our element.  I truly believe that love is the most powerful force for change in the universe.  It has sustained me through many a low point in my life.  If everyone had minds of love, acted out of love, responded with love, the world wouldn’t be in its current fractured state.

I’m not going to belabor this point.  Either you agree with me or you don’t.  If you believe that the world can be saved by war and division and hatred, I’m not going to change your mind.  Ditto if you think that homeless people should be rounded up and shipped off to internment camps.  And if you are adamant in your support of tax cuts for billionaires and the elimination of pediatric cancer research, well then, I don’t know if I even want you reading this blog anymore.  Might I recommend some light reading for you, like Mein Kampf.

On the other hand, if your happy place involves family and friends, and if you want to save the world before all the polar bears are drowned and we’re living in fallout shelters, then you already know that love is the only thing that will save our asses.

Yesterday, Saint Marty wrote about poem about Mars and saving the planet, based on the following prompt from September 3 of The Daily Poet:

On this date in 1976, the Viking 2 unmanned spacecraft took the first close-up pictures of the surface of Mars.  Write a poem about the frantic search to find water (and perhaps living creatures) on Mars.  As there is plenty of life already here on Earth that needs attending to, your poem may or may not take on a cynical tone.

Mars, or How to Save a Dying Planet

by: Martin Achatz

There’s so much red there, even 

the air bleeds, as if the entire

world is an open wound, a bullet

hole in the belly of the universe.

We send probes, motorized gadgets

to crawl, fly in search of canals

gone dry or some indigenous red carrot.

Why do we search for something

life-giving in a place that’s just

a red stain, a murder scene?

Instead, we should go for a walk

at midnight along the shores of

of Lake Superior, let the water

numb our ankles, ache our bones, wash

over us, until we all shine like beach glass.