May 31, 2025: "The Month of June: 13 1/2," Grad, "Graduation Party"

It is that time of year when young people march in caps and gowns, high school orchestras struggle through "Pomp and Circumstance," and parents feel old.

Sharon Olds' daughter matriculates . . . 

The Month of June: 13 1/2

by: Sharon Olds

As our daughter approaches graduation and
puberty at the same time, at her
own, calm, deliberate, serious rate,
she begins to kick up her heels, jazz out her
hands, thrust out her hipbones, chant
I’m great! I’m great! She feels 8th grade coming
open around her, a chrysalis cracking and
letting her out, it falls behind her and
joins the other husks on the ground,
7th grade, 6th grade, the
magenta rind of 5th grade, the
hard jacket of 4th when she had so much pain,
3rd grade, 2nd, the dim cocoon of
1st grade back there somewhere on the path, and
kindergarten like a strip of thumb-suck blanket
taken from the actual blanket they wrapped her in at birth.
The whole school is coming off her shoulders like a
cloak unclasped, and she dances forth in her
jerky sexy child’s joke dance of
self, self, her throat tight and a
hard new song coming out of it, while her
two dark eyes shine
above her body like a good mother and a
good father who look down and
love everything their baby does, the way she
lives their love.

It's difficult for parents to see their children grow, mature into thinking, autonomous creatures.  We always want our kids to stay small, dependent.  Each passing year makes us more and more obsolete.  Pretty soon, you're sitting in bleachers, watching your offspring stride across a stage to collect a piece of paper that pretty much says, "Congratulations!  It's up to you now!"

I went to a graduation party this morning for the son of one of my best friends.  I've watched this young man grow from a quiet kid to a smart, outgoing high school senior.  I used to tower over him.  He now towers over me.  

He's an amazing, empathetic kid.  (I say "kid" because that's what he'll always be to me.)  When I think about the future, I worry a little less because I know young people like him exist.  My generation (and the generation before) has fucked up the world pretty bad and still continues to do so.  It's up to my friend's son and his generation to somehow rescue it.  And I think they will.

Saint Marty wrote a poem tonight about this grad time of year, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:  

On this day in 1859, Big Ben became a working clock in London, England.  For a long time, hearing the bells throughout the city was how Londoners knew what time it was.  Write a poem where the reader knows what time it is and what season it is through the details of your poem.  Do not use words like morning, evening, winter, summer, but let the poem reflect the time of day or season by what is happening in the poem and by the images you use.  For extra credit, have someone in the poem running late of showing up early.

Graduation Party

for E. F.

by: Martin Achatz

I observe the evolution of this boy

from just born to just graduated,

the table jammed with photos,

crayon drawings, poems about pizza

and dogs, ribbons for spelling,

finally a diploma and tassel.

It's like those charts in biology

class:  Dryopithecus to Homo

habalis, erectus, neanderthalensis,

sapien--crawling to knuckling to 

walking.  Now, he sits at a table

with friends, plate piled with

donuts, muffins, bacon and cheese

quiche, his first meal on this day 

after when all he can think about

is tomorrow and tomorrow, his spine

straightening, thick fur melting away,

brain expanding to make room

for the invention of fire.

May 29: Shoes and Another Blanket, My Niece, Tom Cruise, "Bigfoot Valediction"

The boy worries about the old man . . . 

The boy had brought them in a two-decker metal container from the Terrace. The two sets of knives and forks and spoons were in his pocket with a paper napkin wrapped around each set.

"Who gave this to you?"

"Martin. The owner."

"I must thank him."

"I thanked him already," the boy said. "You don't need to thank him."

"I'll give him the belly meat of a big fish," the old man said. "Has he done this for us more than once?"

"I think so."

"I must give him something more than the belly meat then. He is very thoughtful for us."

"He sent two beers."

"I like the beer in cans best."

"I know. But this is in bottles, Hatuey beer, and I take back the bottles."

"That's very kind of you," the old man said. "Should we eat?"

"I've been asking you to," the boy told him gently. "I have not wished to open the container until you were ready."

"I'm ready now," the old man said. "I only needed time to wash."

Where did you wash? the boy thought. The village water supply was two streets down the road. I must have water here for him, the boy thought, and soap and a good towel. Why am I so thoughtless? I must get him another shirt and a jacket for the winter and some sort of shoes and another blanket.

These past few days, the passages from The Old Man and the Sea have all focused on the boy's kindness and devotion toward Santiago.  It's something you don't hear a lot about these days--the goodness of young people.

Today, I did a few things.  Took my son clothes shopping.  He's graduating from the eighth grade on Wednesday, and he didn't have any nice outfits.  So, we took him to Kohl's and let him choose some shirts and a pair of pants.  He loved every minute of it.  When we left the store, he said, "You know, I really like fashion."

Then I attended the high school graduation party for my niece.  It was a wonderful celebration of her accomplishments.  Lots of food and family and friends.  She is a beautiful, smart young woman and has a really bright future.  Like the boy in The Old Man and the Sea, she's full of kindness and compassion.  Plus, she's funny as heck and loves my Bigfoot poems.  That's why I wrote a new Bigfoot poem, made a broadside, and gave it to her this afternoon as a graduation present.  

After the party, I went to see Top Gun:  Maverick with my wife, son, and wife's cousin and family.  I forced my son to watch the original film with me on Friday, so he was all set.  It was a good,  In fact, I would say it's a little better than the original.  Of course, it had a gratuitous shirtless-football-game-on-the-beach scene with lots of flexing and grunting.  (The female members of my group took exception with my use of the word "gratuitous.")  All in all, a nice way to end a pretty nice day.

Saint Marty gives thanks for clothes shopping with his son, my super-talented niece, and Tom Cruise flying at mach 9.

Bigfoot Valediction

for Brianna, May 27, 2022

by:  Martin Achatz

He is all goodbye, a dark palm
waving from the window of woods
on his way to some other place
where morels blossom like hairs
on his shoulders and porcupines gnaw
birch bark to paste. He is the letting
go of summer into harvest,
harvest into hibernation, the thunder
of his snores splitting cold nights
like a sharp tooth on the tongue
where the names of dead
grandmothers and lost friends
sit. He is the fixed foot
of the compass, solid as mother
or father, and the wandering
foot of child, ever circling
wider and wider to find,
define its own circumference.
As you follow him tonight,
sweet girl, into the swamps
of frog song and mosquito sting,
remember to pause every then
and now, pick up a fallen
branch, and knock hard
on a cypress trunk. To let us
know you are alright. To remind
yourself of that nest of woolly
love you were born to leave.

May 30: Beginnings, Daddy/Daughter Date, "In the Beginning"

On this day of my daughter's graduation, I've been thinking a lot about her beginnings.

I'm taking my daughter out to lunch in a few minutes.  Some place local where she loves to eat.  It will be just her and me.  A daddy/daughter date.  She will probably order breakfast, just like me, even though it will be past noon. 

Saint Marty isn't quite at the graduation party yet.

In the Beginning

by:  Martin Achatz

Celeste rolls on the carpet
like dice that won't pause
on green felt, won't give
me the satisfaction
of 3 or 6, 1 or 5.
There is too much in her
knee-and-wall world to touch, too
many snakes with cardboard wings,
neon troikas plastered with words--
apple, cow, star.  When I speak to her,
she studies me, tries to unravel
my dictionary of sound.
Can I teach her to love language
the way lightning loves redwoods?
What will her first word be?
Will she shock me
with hamster, fridge, triangle?  Will
she point out the window, say
wind?  Will she sing the world,
the way Christ sang when He slid
from Mary's iron-taut uterus,
tasted her blood, saw Joseph radiant
with sweat?  Will Celeste's mouth open,
flood waters pour out, 40 days
and nights, preparing the world
for the rainbow of her tongue?

December 14: Too Much Thunder, Perfect Storm, Close to My Heart

"Um, um, um.  Stop that thunder!  Plenty too much thunder up here.  What's the use of thunder?  Um, um, um.  We don't want thunder; we want rum, give us a glass of rum.  Um, um, um!"

Tashtego commenting on an approaching storm as he lashes up the main-top-sail yard.  (I have no idea what that means, but it seems like it would be difficult to do in the middle of a thunderstorm.)

I know that I've been gone for quite some time.  Four days of grading and teaching and writing and working.  I'm a little exhausted.  Still have a ton of grading to do.  Papers and final exams.  I'm almost at the end.  Tomorrow, a poetry reading in the afternoon.  Playing the pipe organ for Mass in the afternoon.  A graduation party for my niece, nephew, and my nephew's fiancee.  Then, in the evening, a benefit poetry reading that I organized for the local homeless shelter.  Six or seven of my good writer friends and some live music.  In between all of that, grading, grading, grading.  At the end, collapse.

I often wonder how this perfect storm of obligations always seems to happen at the end of a semester.  Everything coming together for one great weekend of celebration, poetry, and stress.  Don't get me wrong.  I'm not complaining.  I love giving poetry readings, and I love raising funds and collecting donations for a cause that's really close to my heart.  If I could cut out the grading, I'd be in really good shape right now.  Can't do that, however.

I have to ride this storm out.  My goal is to have all of my work done by Monday.  I'm not sure if that is realistic.  However, I find that I work better under deadlines.  For example, yesterday morning, I was struggling with the ending of my Christmas essay, and I had to record it for the local public radio station at four in the afternoon.  ( I also had to attend my son's Christmas program and register/assemble and scan records/enter charges for about 16 surgical patients.  Another perfect storm.)  I'll spare you the details, but I can say that I had an essay to record at 4 p.m.  I also recorded an interview about the benefit poetry reading while I was there.

So, you see, my faithful disciples.  I have not forgotten or abandoned my blogging duties.  They have simply taken a back seat for a while.  I have nothing profound to say this evening, aside from a little advice:  make sure, at the end of the semester, that you have plenty of gin in the liquor cabinet.

Saint Marty is thankful this evening for his loving and supportive family.  He wouldn't survive weeks like this without them.

June 2: All the Possibility, Les Murray, "Nursing Home"

Yes, I just came back from a graduation party.  So many young people in shorts and tee-shirts, walking around, trying to act like adults.  It was sort of intoxicating, the memory of that kind of hope.  All the possibility of those last days of high school, when teachers and parents and aunts and uncles are telling you that you can do anything.  Anything at all.

On the other side of the coin, there's the elderly, at the end of their long journeys.  They have done it all.  Seen it all.  But nobody wants to listen to them any more.

Maybe, as part of graduating from high school, every senior should be required to visit a nursing home and talk to at least ten residents.  Ask them about their lives.  Ask them for advice.  Thank them for making the world a better place.

Saint Marty thinks the class could be called "Growing Up 101."

Nursing Home

by:  Les Murray

Ne tibi supersis:
don't outlive yourself,
panic, or break a hip
or spit purée at the staff
at the end of gender,
never a happy ender -

yet in the pastel light
of indoors, there is a lady
who has distilled to love
beyond the fall of memory.

She sits holding hands
with an ancient woman
who calls her brother and George
as bees summarize the garden.

June 2: Didn't Like Life, Graduation Party, Heartbreaks and Heart Attacks

There was a still life on Billy's bedside table--two pills, an ashtray with three lipstick-stained cigarettes in it, one cigarette still burning, and a glass of water.  The water was dead.  So it goes.  Air was trying to get out of that dead water.  Bubbles were clinging to the walls of the glass, too weak to climb out.

The cigarettes belonged to Billy's chain-smoking mother.  She had sought the ladies' room, which was off the ward for WACS and WAVES and SPARS and WAFS who had gone bananas.  She would be back at any moment.  

Billy covered his head with his blanket again.  He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward--always got much sicker until she went away.  It wasn't that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality.  She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired white woman with a high-school education.

She upset Billy simply by being his mother.  She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.

Billy is one lucky bastard.  He isn't shot by the German soldiers.  He doesn't die on the train ride to his first prison camp.  Doesn't die in the delousing showers.  Later, he survives the firebombing of Dresden.  People are dying all around him, and yet Billy survives.  But he doesn't like life.  At all.

I have been in Billy's shoes once or twice.  When my sister was dying in a hospital bed in my parents' living room, I didn't like life very much.  Many years ago, when my wife was in the grips of her addiction and living with another man in another town, I didn't like life very much.  When my brother recently had his second heart attack, I didn't like life very much.

Tonight, I went to a graduation party.  It was for the son of one of my best friends.  There were school pictures lining the front sidewalk of my friend's house.  Hotdogs were on the barbecue.  People were playing games on the lawn.  Dogs were running around, trying to get some table scraps.  Everyone was laughing and talking.

My friend's son was making the rounds, talking to the guests.  Thanking them for coming.  At one point, just as my wife and I were leaving, he came up to us and said, "I don't think I've had the chance to say 'hello' and thank you for coming."  And it sounded sincere.  It wasn't just a social obligation.  He seemed genuinely grateful for our presence.

That graduation party--a young person moving into adulthood, so happy and hopeful--reminded me that life really is good, despite the heartbreaks and heart attacks that come along the way.  Life is good.  Can I get an "amen" on that?

Tonight, Saint Marty is thankful for barbecued hot dogs.

May 9: Spare Time, Type-A, Pablo Neruda, "Ode to Laziness," New Cartoon

For the most part, [Ives and Annie] saw each other on weekends.  There was very little they did not do together in their spare time:  they went to jazz clubs in the village, visited galleries, haunted bookshops, had picnics in the park, and sometimes, with a borrowed car, took drives upstate, along the Hudson and beautiful wooded areas, through quiet towns and countryside, where they fantasized about living one day...

This is Ives and Annie in the first flush of their romance.  Spending all their spare time together.  Music and art and books and trips.  No obligations of jobs and children and family.  Freedom is abundant, and laziness is treasured.

I have little spare time for laziness.  Aside from Saturday morning, most of my days are filled with various tasks.  This afternoon, I have to clean a house and then play the pipe organ for Saturday evening mass.  When I get home this evening, I have more cleaning to do (vacuuming and a bathroom).  In between, I have a card to drop off at a graduation party (which I can't attend because of my other obligations) and finish writing a poem for church tomorrow morning.

I can't remember the last time I just indulged in pure laziness.  Sitting back and, despite having a full slate of to-dos, doing something completely frivolous.  Reading a book that isn't for school or book club or research.  Watching a movie or television program just for the hell of it.

Summer provides more opportunities for laziness.  On 80- or 90-degree days, when simply breathing makes you sweat, laziness is the order of the day,  Maybe.  Being a type-A person, I find myself a little anxious being lazy, feel guilty taking naps.

Saint Marty needs to learn to let go.  Or get a prescription for Xanax.

Ode to Laziness

by:  Pablo Neruda

Yesterday I felt as if my ode
was never going to sprout.
At least it should
have been showing
a green leaf.
I scratched the soil:  "Come up,
sister ode,"
I said,
"I promised to produce you,
don't be afraid of me,
I'll not step on your
four leaves, your
four hands, ode,
we'll have tea together.
Come up
and I'll crown you first among my odes,
we'll go to the seashore
on our bicycles."
It was useless.

Then,
high amid the pines,
I saw lovely
naked laziness,
she led me off bedazzled
and bemused,
she showed me on the sand
small broken bits
of marine matter,
driftwood, seaweed, stones,
seabirds' feathers.
I hunted but did not find
yellow agates.
The sea
surged higher,
crumbling towers,
invading
the shoreline of my homeland,
sending forth
successive catastrophes of foam.
A solitary corolla
cast a ray
against the sand.
I saw silvery petrels cruising
and, like black crosses,
cormorants
clinging to the rocks.
I freed a bee from
its death throes in a spiderweb,
I put a pebble
in my pocket,
it was smooth, as smooth
as a bird's breast,
meanwhile along the coast,
all afternoon,
sun and fog waged war.
At times
the fog glowed
with
a topaz light,
other times
a moist sun cast
rays dripping yellow drops.

That night,
thinking of the duties of my
elusive ode,
I took off my shoes
beside the fire,
sand spilled from them
and soon I was falling
fast asleep.

Confessions of Saint Marty

May 17: Feasting and Carousing, Graduation Party, Eleanor Lerman, "Starfish," New Cartoon

"What a night!" he repeated, hoarsely.  "What feasting and carousing!  A real gorge!  I must have eaten the remains of thirty lunches.  Never have I seen such leavings, and everything well-ripened and seasoned with the passage of time and the heat of the day.  Oh, it was rich, my friends, rich!"

Templeton is a total hedonist.  He stuffs himself on rotten meat and popcorn kernels and half-eaten hotdogs.  He doesn't worry about indigestion or his stomach exploding.  He's a rat.  Rats scavenge.  Rats eat.  Rats don't care about anything but themselves, at least in the Charlotte's Web universe.

I have indulged myself a little bit today.  I went to McDonald's for breakfast.  I read The Fault in Our Stars.  I went to my niece's high school graduation party, at which I ate a lot of stuff I shouldn't have eaten.  Soft pretzels with nacho cheese.  Cheesy potatoes.  Mac and cheese.  (My whole gastrointestinal system will probably be backed up for a week as a result!)  And now I'm sitting on my couch, watching an episode of The Lawrence Welk Show (another guilty pleasure).  After a week of mourning, not to mention starting a new job, I decided to give myself a little vacation.

Of course, I'm experiencing a little guilt now.  I should have been more productive.  Maybe picked sticks off my lawn or raked my backyard.  Worked on a new poem.  But I didn't.  Sometimes, you really do have to just...stop.  Breathe.  Relax.

Tonight's poem comes from a poet named Eleanor Lerman, and it's about appreciating life, in all its facets.

Saint Marty needs to do that a little more often.

Starfish

by:  Eleanor Lerman

This is what life does.  It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee.  It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee.  Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night
the channel was full of starfish.  And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud.  Reeds
speak to you of the natural world:  they whisper,
they sing.  And herons pass by.  Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment?  Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing.  There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart.  Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become.  And then life lets you go home to think
about all this.  Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out.  This is life's way of letting you know that
you are lucky.  (It won't give you smart or brave,
so you'll have to settle for lucky.)  Because you
were born at a good time.  Because you
were able to listen when people spoke to you.  Because you
stopped when you should have started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert.  (Pie for the dog, as well.)  And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

Confessions of Saint Marty