June 13: Chanting, Holy Spirit, New Cartoon, Michael Mlekoday, "Going North"

On that occasion, during Holy Week, Father Tom, transplanted from the Bronx and studying advanced Latin at the Gregorian University, had told them [Ives and his family] about a tenth-century church in Trastevere where some of the most devout Catholics in Rome gathered on Wednesday evenings for services that would "tear one's heart out," as he had put it.  So they went, and no sooner had they entered its candlelit gloom than Ives did feel the presence of early Christian spirits.  That night worshipers took turns giving testimony to their faith and strong belief in Him before the congregation.  They wept, beat their chests, they lay stretched out on their bellies on the floor, praying.  Others crawled on their knees, hands folded in prayer, toward the altar, their shadows thrown high against the vaulted walls.  Chanting in Latin, their eyes wide open, they seemed to be seeing something--the presence of Jesus of the Mother or the Holy Spirit--that Ives could not.

Ives is a deeply spiritual man.  Yet, he struggles with his faith, as most Christians do.  He goes to church every Sunday.  He does charitable work in his neighborhood.  Quietly.  Above all, Ives teaches his children to love God.  On a trip to Italy, he takes his family to the church described in the above passage.  He marvels at the utter surrender in the worshipers.  How the veil seems to have been torn away from their eyes and their vision is more eternal, less temporal.  Ives strives his whole life to reach this state of understanding.

Like Ives, I've had glimpses of what I call Holy Spirit moments, when something beyond my understanding has taken hold.  Sometimes, it's happened during worship services, when candlelight climbs the walls and incense clouds the air.  Sometimes, it's happened during songs I've sung or played at church; the music starts, and suddenly the hair on my arms bristles and I feel . . . something moving in the place.

I was lucky.  I grew up with church.  I didn't have to spend years on some spiritual journey.  Church was a part of my life.  Always.  Some people might consider that a bad thing.  I don't.  My upbringing has helped with my understanding of the world.  I like to think that I'm a more tolerant, loving person because of it.  I try not to judge too much (although I frequently fail on this account).  But, I'm a work in progress, for sure.

One of my biggest failings is trust.  When troubles come my way, I tend to panic.  Run around, crying out, "The sky is falling!"  It takes me quite a while to calm down, take a deep breath, and pray.  I think it's part of my control issues.  I don't like it when my life becomes a big bundle of entropy.  I think Ives' biggest struggle is the same.  He has a good, happy life, and then bad shit happens.  For over 150 pages, he is lost, until the end of the novel.  Then he's found again.

I tend to get a little lost every day.  Michael Mlekoday's poem today is about going north, looking for something.  I think that pretty much describes all of us.  We spend our whole lives trying to avoid the scary stuff--black bears, falling ceilings, death.  We walk around, sometimes in circles, looking for the answers.

Saint Marty just needs to stop walking.  Look up, metaphorically.  That's where the answers are written.

Going North

by:  Michael Mlekoday

The black bear of a Bible
that belonged to my grandparents
has gold-lined pages, paws
dipped in honey.

Running through its forests
is like deja vu every time.
The black bear eats everything.
If you've never stared past its teeth,

you've never held your breath waiting
to be ended.  The largest male black bear
weighs almost a thousand pounds
and can be found hunting at night

somewhere deep in the North.
I still have nightmares of his silence.
I haven't eaten fish since I saw him
pick a salmon from its bones.

Confessions of Saint Marty

June 12: Gold Hamilton, Nature Essay, Juggling Fairy Tale, Michael Mlekoday, "Self Portrait, Downtown"

Roaming through the aisles, Ives had picked up some half-dozen ties and wallets for certain male friends, a scarf for his brother, and a nice French hat for his sister Kate.  That year he had decided on buying Robert a good watch and prevailed upon an overwhelmed saleswoman to pull some twenty watches out of a case, before he settled on a black-banded gold Hamilton with Roman numerals, suitable, Ives had thought, for a young man headed to a seminary.

Ives never gives that watch to Robert.  Within a couple of hours, Ives will be standing on a sidewalk in front of a church, staring down at the pavement, into the shocked expression of his murdered son.  Ives' life is on a collision course with tragedy.  A sledgehammer of change.

This past month, I have been amazed how quickly the trajectory of life can veer in an unexpected direction.  I thought this summer was going to be calm, easy.  I would have time to write, read, clean out my attic.  Yet, in the space of a few weeks, my summer has been completely transformed.  I now am putting myself in debt for another five years to put a new roof on my house.  I don't even know what's wrong with my car, and I still have a huge hole in my kitchen ceiling.

I know you're all probably tired of hearing about these subjects.  Sorry.  These are things I fall asleep and wake up thinking about.  I'm actually thinking that I need to get another part-time job or sell some organs to raise a few extra dollars.  All this worry is exhausting.

I finished writing my nature essay a couple of days ago.  Put it in an envelope and mailed it yesterday to the contest.  It's over and done.  And the best I can say about the essay is that it's done.  It's not great.  In fact, I considered not submitting it at all.  I've just been so preoccupied this past month that I didn't devote as much energy to my writing.  The result was an essay that's alright.  Not great.  Certainly not worth $250.

It feels like I'm very scattered.  My life is in fragments at the moment.  I haven't been able to concentrate.  Perhaps, after I find out what's wrong with my car and the roofers are stripping my house of shingles, I'll be able to carve out a little peace of mind.  Not right now, though.

Once upon a time, a juggler named Freego lived in a small village on the shores of a beautiful lake.  Freego was the worst juggler that had ever lived.  He could only juggle one ball at a time because he lacked concentration.  He would stand in the village square and throw his ball in the air over and over.  Nobody stopped to watch Freego's act.

One day, Freego decided he needed to learn how to juggle two balls.  All day and all night, he practiced at home.  He threw balls, caught balls, dropped balls.  After many months, Freego thought it was time to unveil his new, improved juggling act.

He went to the village square and called out, "Watch the Great Freego defy the laws of gravity!"

A crowd gathered as Freego took his balls out of his pocket.  He took a deep breath and tossed his balls in the air.  One ball flew into the face of the village baker.  The other ball fell into the village well.

The crowd slowly dispersed, and Freego went home, humiliated.

Moral of the story:  don't play with your balls in public.

And Saint Marty lived happily ever after.

Self Portrait, Downtown

by:  Michael Mlekoday

We left because we were lost and broken.
The sun rode us like donkeys.  Our hooves
turned colors in the dust.  Shush, you said,
every time I dropped a mirror and it broke
into song.  It's the only way I could see
myself in fragments, which I think is how
the earliest surgeons studied before cutting.
Where were we going?  Maybe the woods,
maybe Detroit.  There's a way in which
the thick skin of air in the woods hangs
like sweat in the inner city.  I've mistaken
drops of air conditioner exhaust for rain
while leaning against apartment brick,
watching a fistfight bloom in mid-July,
the highway humming in the distance
like the time you kicked a hive and smiled.
I lied.  We didn't really leave, and broken
is just another way of saying we left shards
and splinters of ourselves everywhere,
like kids trying to leave a trail back home.
We're still here, right here, and here,
this debris makes the street glitter like a river.

Nope.  Not me.

June 11: Tattered Nerves, Blessings and Curses, Michael Mlekoday, "Home Remedies"

He [Ives] stood on the front steps of his building on a nice spring day, in checked Bermuda shorts and new tennis shoes, waiting for his wife and daughter, and for Ramirez and his family, so they might all go for a long drive and picnic upstate.  He fell asleep one night with the television on in the background, his tattered nerves soothed by Bing Crosby in the movie Going My Way, and he thought about his son as a priest.  He played bridge aboard a Circle Line boat, during an Advertising Club cruise, as it made its way down the Hudson under the George Washington Bridge, and won twenty dollars in petty bets.  He wept while watching Miracle on 34th Street. . .

Ives is trying to move on.  He takes trips with his family, watches movies on television, goes on boat cruises, and plays cards.  Yet, no matter how hard he tries to create a son-less life, his life keeps bringing his son back to him.  Bing Crosby reminds him of his son.  James Bond reminds him of his son.  The assassination of Robert Kennedy reminds him of his son.  Each blessing becomes a curse.

I had a stress test this morning.  Two hours of scans and treadmills.  I didn't go into cardiac arrest.  The cardiologist didn't come charging into the room, yelling, "Stop the test immediately!"  I showed up, did the test, and left, hungry and sweaty.  The nurse was kind.  The ultrasound tech was funny.  They were blessings this morning.  Now, I wait until I get a phone call from my doctor.

I'm not worried really.  I don't think there's anything wrong with my heart.  The chest pain I've been experiencing has subsided, ever since I started taking medicine for acid reflux.  Plus, my life has pretty much been a stress test recently.  My kitchen ceiling.  My roof.  My car.  My job.  Two funerals this week.

I'm really good with life's curses.  My philosophy has always been to be prepared for the worst.  If anything besides the worst happens, I count that a blessing.  For instance, my car is currently out of commission.  I have an appointment with the mechanic on Monday.  I'm preparing myself for some really bad news.  If the mechanic comes back with a four-hundred-dollar fix, I'll count that as a blessing.  Plus, my sister has loaned me her car for the past two days.  That's a great blessing.

Other blessings that have come my way:  the credit union will give me a loan to fix my roof; the insurance said it will fix my kitchen ceiling (I'm a little skeptical); and the weather has been dry (no water dripping into my kitchen in the last week).

I just watched a movie with my daughter called God Is Not Dead.  In the movie, one of the characters keeps saying, "God is good.  Always."  Curses can become blessings, with God's help.

Saint Marty needs to be reminded of that every once in a while.

Home Remedies

by:  Michael Mlekoday

Baba once cast a demon out of my brother.
She slapped him hard across the face
and left a glass of vodka
on the kitchen table overnight.
By morning, the glass was empty
and the rainclouds hung fat and fanged
over our block.  Whenever it stormed,
she tongued her dentures out of her mouth
and sucked them back in, staring
out the window, and crossed herself,
cursing under her breath in Polish.

She taught us the old curses and the blessings,
brought us to the cemetery to practice both.
I was always better with the curses.
The way they had to be dragged
from the body, the odor
of sea salt stuck to the breath,
how they kicked the heart
like the pop of a burnt-out bulb.

Amen.

June 10: Older Mr. Ives, a Funeral, Michael Mlekoday, "Genealogy"

...On one of those visitors' days, around Christmas, he found himself standing before a well-dressed, middle-aged gentleman, whose own eyes were sad--the older Mr. Ives--who placed his warm hand on the boy's face and kneeling before the lad, took a long, long look, making his decision.

That passage describes how Ives is adopted by his father.  Ives never knew his birth parents.  He was left on the steps of a foundling home as an infant.  No note.  No way to track his genealogy.  The only clue to his origins are his olive complexion and dark hair.  Ives spends his life imagining his parents were Cuban or Italian or Spanish, but he never knows for sure.  Yet, he has a father--a good, kind man who provides him a home, encourages his artistic talents, and loves him unconditionally.

I want to talk about another good, kind man tonight. 

This afternoon, I attended the funeral of my wife's great uncle, Melvin.  Sitting in church, listening to the pastor talk about the life of this man, I was incredibly moved and humbled.  Melvin was married to the same woman for 72 years.  He served in Europe during World War II and witnessed firsthand the atrocities of the Holocaust (a fact I didn't know until today).  His whole life, he supported the causes of veterans--marching in parades, selling poppies, attending Memorial Day services.  And he did all this with tremendous heart and humor.

It's a sad occasion when anyone dies.  Today, my wife feels like she's lost a grandfather.  I feel like the world has lost a great soul, in every sense of the word.  A person of great courage and honor and love.  I think the measure of a person's life is whether the world is a better place because of that life.

The world is a much better place because of Melvin.

Saint Marty salutes a true hero this evening.

Genealogy

by:  Michael Mlekoday

One of my grandparents rented a gramophone,
another owned three songbirds and a shot glass.

One slept in the day, the other remembered
the timbre of wild horses, tallgrass prairies.

All of my belongings are loosely related
to paper; some by ancestry,

others by weight or malleability,
by color or function or analogy.

One of my grandparents
was always connected to machines.

Another witnessed Mussolini
strung up like a bird feeder.

All of my girlfriends have tattoos
in languages they cannot speak.

One of my grandparents was a darkened basement;
another was a clothesline waiting for summer,

already exploding in white and wind,
shaking like a fist at the imperfect sky.

I have a kind of recurring nightmare,
only it comes in daytime when I am awake,

but like a dream I cannot control it
and it teaches me something about falling.

In the vision, my home catches fire
like paper does, quick and forever.

I stumble from room to room,
searching for something worth saving,

but cannot choose.  One of my grandparents
was a wood stove.  Another was an axe.

A true American hero

June 9: Toss and Turn, Relaxation, Michael Mlekoday, "Don't Ask Why I Stopped Believing in Magic"

It was in fact a blessing.  An ability to sleep more easily and deeply had come to him during the past few years.  Where he used to toss and turn and drive his wife crazy at night, no sooner would he now lay his head upon the pillow that he would fall asleep.  But not into that sleep of old age, but into the sleep of a child, an infinitude of possibilities swaddling him.

For most of his adult life, Ives does not sleep well.  After his son's death, he thrashes in his sleep, scratches his arms and legs, leaves huge welts and sores all over his body.  He's tormented for decades.  Sleep is a curse for Ives.

I have never been a heavy sleeper.  Any noise can rouse me.  If my son rolls over in his bed in the next room, I wake up.  If my wife breathes heavily, I wake up.  If the moon is too bright, I wake up.  I stay up late, and I get up before dawn.  Morning is not my friend.

It's a matter of relaxation.  Actually, it's a matter of not relaxing.  I always have a hard time letting go of the day's worries.  Collapsed ceilings.  Cars making weird noises.  Roof jobs and chest pains.  I can't seem to forget all that stuff when my head hits the pillow.

I wish I could somehow write everything that's troubling me on a piece of paper, hand it to God, crawl under the covers, and simply fall asleep.  Writer Anne Lamott uses the glove compartment of her car for just this purpose.  It's her way of giving things up to the Great Problem Solver in the sky.

Maybe Saint Marty will write "I need a new ceiling, a new roof, a new job, and a new car" on an envelope and stuff it in his underwear drawer.

Don't Ask Why I Stopped Believing in Magic

by:  Michael Mlekoday

darling, unless you want to hear
about the year Darnell's little sister
was struck by a drive-by bullet
through her bedroom window,

or how I condemned my dad's laziness
for missing Christmas Eve dinner
two weeks before he died,
or that I have friends my age

who are already divorced.
True, sometimes it rains
so hard, the whole city
sound like a music box.

Sometimes the snow
makes our neighborhood
feel like a secret handshake.
And true, sweetheart, we just met

a month ago and here I am,
writing you this letter
while a train howls past
my apartment, and I wonder

if it would take me to you,
if the boy must one day end
in order to be more like a myth,
if remembering is a kind of magic.

The last time I visited
my old neighborhood, I couldn't tell
the difference between the houses
that had been hit by the tornado

and the ones that were simply run down.
I walked up to my old house
and ran my hand along the siding,
wondering who lived there now,

and I remembered the time
when Misian and Alicia and maybe others
started sleeping in their little sisters' beds
with their backs to the outside walls,

hoping to protect the children
from stray gunfire, lying over them
soft as snow, and now, looking at the photo
you sent me of you holding a newborn,

I don't think I can answer
your question except by telling you
the night is sweet where I am,
and sometimes I'm a forgetful man.

This is not my underwear drawer

June 8: My Sister Again, "Ives" Dip, Poet of the Week, Michael Mlekoday, "Self Potrait, Fat Tueday"

My sister--the one who recently had surgery at the University of Michigan--is back in the hospital again.  She was transported via ambulance from the nursing home to the ER on Saturday.  Dehydration.  Possible infection.  Changes in her mental status.

I went to visit her after work this afternoon.  She was really agitated when I got there.  I wasn't even sure she knew who I was.  She kept thumping her leg, over and over, in some kind of rhythm.  Bap-bap-bap.  Pause.  bap-bap-bap.  For the first 20 minutes I was in the room, all she said was "what."  I'd say, "Are you thirsty?"  She'd say, "What."  I'd ask, "Are you cold?"  She'd say, "What."

I've visited people in the psychiatric ward.  My sister reminded of the people I saw there.  At points, I thought she was going to rip out her IV or try to get out of bed.  She never relaxed.  Her legs were moving, or her arms or her hands, as if her body was running some kind of race in bed.

The doctor's still don't know what's wrong with my sister.  During the hour-and-a-half I was with her tonight, she never was herself.  I fed her some mashed potatoes and gravy.  Gave her water and milk to drink.  The only time she even said my name was when I was leaving.  I got up to go, and she looked at me and said, "I love you, Mart." 

When I got back to my car, I sat there crying for a couple of minutes.

So, I'm a little down tonight.  My Ives dip question is:

Will my sister ever be well--mentally and physically--again?

And the answer:

Then Explixa spoke of "existing outside of time."  Each moment, as he saw it, one died only to be reincarnated again.  With each "little death," one moved inexorably toward the eternal peace of a Supreme Death.

Supreme Death.  Well, I have to say that's not very encouraging.  Maybe I need to stop doing Ives dips.

Michael Mlekoday is the Poet of the Week.  He is a National Poetry Slam Champion, and his collection The Dead Eat Everything is a stunning debut.

Saint Marty needs a drink.

Self Portrait, Fat Tuesday

by:  Michael Mlekoday

Then I ate the dust
of an abandoned house,
and in my mouth it was as sweet
as the time our heat kicked on
after three days.  Then I ate a police officer's gun,
dismantling it into small pieces like warm bread
and tucking them slowly into my mouth.
And as I swallowed all this, I expanded.
And as I took the city into me like a harvest,
I grew hard as brick, hard as a frozen creek
behind a cemetery overflowing with names
I cannot remember for I have eaten them, too, yes,
I have gorged myself on the dead.  I have made my body
haunted, and it was sweet as a creaking hinge in the dark.

Make it a double