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

October 7: "Adage," Monday, Clichés

Since I started taking creative writing workshops, I've been taught to avoid clichés like the plague.  (Okay, I know it's an old joke, but it still makes me chuckle.)  

I've tried to follow that rule, for the most part.  However, there was a time when each cliché was new and surprising.  Some author once wrote "dead as a doornail," and it was considered bold and insightful.  I'm not quite sure when originality gives way to hackneyed. 

Billy Collins clichés it up a little . . . 

Adage

by: Billy Collins

When it’s late at night and branches
are banging against the windows,
you might think that love is just a matter

of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself
into the fire of someone else,
but it’s a little more complicated than that.

It’s more like trading the two birds
who might be hiding in that bush
for the one you are not holding in your hand.

A wise man once said that love
was like forcing a horse to drink
but then everyone stopped thinking of him as wise.

Let us be clear about something.
Love is not as simple as getting up
on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor’s clothes.

No, it’s more like the way the pen
feels after it has defeated the sword.
It’s a little like the penny saved or the nine dropped stitches.

You look at me through the halo of the last candle
and tell me love is an ill wind
that has no turning, a road that blows no good,

but I am here to remind you,
as our shadows tremble on the walls,
that love is the early bird who is better late than never.

It was a Monday.  (That may be a cliché.)  Everyone knows what that sentence implies--it just wasn't a good day.  I won't say it was a terrible day, but it certainly wasn't one for the record books.  Nothing exciting occurred.  I didn't get a call from the Swedish Academy.  Or win the lottery.  Or write a perfect poem.

However, I did teach my Intro to Film class.  And revised some poems.  And visited with my great friend Jody.  In short, I kept myself busy as a beaver.  As Mary Poppins said, a stitch in time saves nine.  (I have no idea what that adage means, but it has something to do with careful work.)

I'm not feeling very . . . original tonight.  More like tired, bordering on exhausted.  Tonight feels like a cliché, because Mondays are supposed to be disappointing.  So, I'm going to leave it there.  I'm sure that there are people who will argue with me, saying that it's all about attitude.  If I changed my attitude, perhaps today would not have been so . . . so . . . Monday.

But I didn't.

Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez once wrote, "This should be the spirit of every Monday.  Know that something good will always happen."

Forgive Saint Marty if he doesn't stand up and cheer.

A cliché picture--it has appeared a couple times on the blog..