June 25: Mental Illness, Peter Balakian, "Reading Dickinson / Summer '68"

I used to have a "normal" family, or at least I thought I did.  I have learned that "normal" is a relative thing, especially if your relatives suffer from mental illness.

My life has been touched by mental illness many times.  My wife has bipolar.  I have siblings who struggle with depression and psychosis and bipolar (undiagnosed).  Sometimes, I think that I'm making up for having a relatively quiet childhood.  I was blessed with parents who have a stable marriage.  Five sisters and three brothers who, for the most part, got along.

Mental illness does not discriminate.  I myself have had bouts of depression.  I think it goes with the territory when it comes to being a poet.  Look at Emily Dickinson.  Darkness and death and mental illness.

So here's one for all the "normal" people out there.

Saint Marty has no idea who you are.

Reading Dickinson / Summer '68

by:  Peter Balakian

In the hermetic almost dark

under the fluorescent dizz

 

I found her broken nerves,

smoke coming off the dashes,

the caps like jolts to the neck,

 

the pried-open spaces between vowels

where the teeth bit off twine

and the tongue was raw then cool with ice.

 

The air of the stockroom after lunch

was the marbleized silence of the

small blank pages she stitched into privacy.

 

Air of paper and faint glue

bond, carbon, graph, yellow pads,

 

in the stockroom I could read alone—

the confetti of money dissolved on the blank wall.

 

After work, I slid the numbered poems

on blue mimeo into my playbook,

and felt the open field

 

the zig-zagging past cornerbacks,

the white lines skewed to heaven.

 

Excuse my mood—unbridled, chemical,

her scrawled messages smooth to the mind,

 

excuse my absence, again and yes, then, too—

 

the cold stone of the Palisades was there

after we split—

 

alone naked in the Hudson,

the water greasing me in the tepid, chemical mix,

 

before I returned

to the cement of 9W in my father’s Skylark

 

the night black and soundless within.

June 24: Mother's Birthday, Peter Balakian, "My Mother is a Fish"

Tomorrow is my mother's birthday.  I believe that she is going to be 86.  You must forgive me.  I'm not good with birth dates.  I'm lucky that I remembered the day at all.

My mother's two remaining sisters have driven up from Detroit for the occasion.  It will be the first time in two or three years that they've all been together.  My mother doesn't know hat they're coming.  I'm hoping that she remembers them.

You see, my mother's memory isn't great.  She barely remembers my sister who lives in Washington.  When my sister was visiting last year, my mother kept looking at my sister and saying to me, "Isn't she a nice lady."  However, my mother seems to able to remember things from her childhood quite well.  Sometimes, she sits at the dining room table and tells me stories of when she was a little girl.  It's as if her long term memory is intact, but her short term memory is short circuiting.   I think that the only reason she remembers me is because I see her almost every day.

So, tonight, Saint Marty is honoring his mother with a poem by Peter Balakian.

"My Mother is a Fish"

by:  Peter Balakian

—Faulkner 

My mother is a fish

and the sky is low and orange,

and the long grass rises   

in the still air.

The mud is black   

and worms turn   

their cold segments   

at my feet.

      I used to walk   

      with an old lady.

      It seemed far from water

      and the ground sank.

      Weeds were higher

      than my head.   

      Slugs slept

      in the mud.

My mother is a fish

and the sky swallows my head.   

A fine rain comes

and softens the ferns.

In March before the crocus   

and the lily,

eggs bunch in the shoal   

of green jelly.

Crabs glide through them.   

A kingfisher is dead

on a rock.

My mother is an eel   

winding a light

around the rock.   

Even without a moon   

the black glows.

*

The sun grows like an egg

over the bridge,

the first birds are silver

and swoop down for my mother.

      When the lady came

      we jumped—

      She took us to find worms   

      we could squeeze

      in our hands.

      I went with my father

      to the dark water.

      I went with a bucket

      of mud.

      When we doubled the worm   

      on the hook and it coiled,   

      I could hear how a bass

      could thud.

      I grabbed it

      with a wet hand,   

      and watched its eye   

      go black

      as I dropped it

      in a metal bucket.

      Hack it along the gill

      and throw the head to the gulls.

My mother is a fish

and flutters in my bucket.   

The sky is a fleck of stones   

on the night water.

Turns my arms silver.

The wind calls my father   

out to where bigger birds   

call and caw and spin,

where my father goes

and leaves me with the mud   

and gulls on the patchy water.

My mom and dad

June 21: Low Blood Sugar, Peter Balakian, "Baseball Days, '61"

I was at work early on Monday.  It was about 6:45 a.m., and nobody else was around.  I like working in the medical office at this time of the day.  It's quiet and dark.  No phones ringing.  No TV mumbling in the waiting room.  It's easy for me to get centered.

Yesterday, however, I had a low blood sugar.  I have been an insulin-dependent diabetic since I was thirteen, and I've been using an insulin pump for about ten years.  Usually, the pump keeps my blood glucose levels pretty even.  But, every once in a while, I have a little problem.

I started to sweat and get dizzy.  I knew what was wrong.  Now, in the past, when my sister was my boss, I would go into her office and find something to eat.  She always kept her refrigerator well-stocked with juices and cheeses and chocolates.

Whether it was my altered mental state because of the low blood sugar or just plain habit, I got up from my desk and walked to the door of what used to be my sister's office.  I had my hand on the door handle before I realized what I was doing.  I stood there, reminding myself that my sister is gone.  I had to repeat that phrase several times in my head:  "She's gone, she's gone, she's gone."  And then I started crying.

I cried for quite a while.

It was a strange collision of past and present for me.  I was quite temporally disoriented for a few minutes.  Again, I don't know if it was my medical issue or my sister's ghost or nostalgia or a combination of all of these things.

I thought I was doing pretty well in my grieving process.  Holding it together.  Yesterday, it all came crashing down for a little while.  I went back to my desk, found a juice in my lunch bag, and sat at my desk and thought about the past, sort of the way Peter Balakian does in the poem below.  I miss my sister.  A lot.

Saint Marty is still a little sad tonight.  Maybe he needs to eat a brownie.

Baseball Days, '61

by:  Peter Balakian

All summer the patio drifted in and out of light the color of margarine;

days were blue, not always sky blue.

At night the word Algeria circulated among the grown-ups.

A patient of my father had whooping cough, the words drifted into

summer blue. The evenings spun into stadium lights.

Kennedy’s hair blew across the screen. Castro was just a sofa.

I saw James Meredith’s face through a spread of leaves

on the evening news. The fridge sweat with orangeade,

the trees whooped some nights in rain—

a kid down the street kept coughing into his mitt.

Static sounds from Comiskey and Fenway came

though the vinyl, the plastic, the pillow—

So when it left Stallard’s hand, when Roger Maris’s arms whipped

the bat and the bullet-arc carried into the chasm the disaffections

at 344 ft. near the bullpen fence

under the green girder holding up the voices rising into the façade and over the

     river

where a Baptist choir on Lenox Ave. was sending up a variation of Sweet Chariot

into the traffic on the FDR that was jammed at the Triboro

where a derrick was broken and the cables of its arms picked up the star-blast of

     voices coming over the Stadium façade spilling down the black next-game

     sign into the vector

of a tilted Coke bottle on a billboard

at the edge of the river where a cloud of pigeons rose over Roosevelt Island.

It was evening by the time the cars unjammed and the green of the outfield unfroze

and the white arc had faded into skyline before fall came

full of boys throwing themselves onto the turf with inexplicable desire

for the thing promised. The going. Then gone.

My sister, Sally

Jne 20: A Few Facts, Poet of the Week, Peter Balakian, "Ellis Island"

I have found out a few facts about Fred Trump, the father of the presumptive Republican nominee for President of the United States.  (These facts were not difficult to locate.  Simply type "Donald Trump parents" into Google.)

First, Fred Trump was the son of German immigrants.  (That's right.  Donald is only second generation American.  His grandparents came through Ellis Island.)  Fred built a real estate empire in New York, building low income housing.  In 1927, Fred was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally, but he was released without being charged.  Much later in his life, he was investigated and cited by the Department of Justice for civil rights violations.  It seems Mr. Trump didn't like renting apartments to people of color.  (He instructed his rental agents not to rent to African Americans and also to encourage African American tenants to vacate his properties.)  Folk singer Woody Guthrie, who once rented one of Fred's apartments, wrote lyrics about Fred Trump, accusing him of stirring up racial hatred "in the bloodpot of human hearts."

That's where Donald Trump came from.  German immigrants.  Ellis Island.  A self-made real estate tycoon who had more than a little problem with African Americans, just like his son has problems with Muslim Americans.

This week, I have chosen Peter Balakian as Poet of the Week.  Peter is the son of Armenian immigrants and grew up in New Jersey, not far from Fred and Donald Trump's stomping grounds.  He recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection Ozone Journal.

Saint Marty thinks we should all celebrate immigrants this week.

Ellis Island

by:  Peter Balakian

The tide’s a Bach cantata.

The beach is the swollen neck of Isaac.

The tide’s a lamentation of white opals.

The beach is free. The Coke machine rusted out.

Here is everything you’ll never need:

hemp-cords, curry-combs, jade and musk,   

a porcelain cup blown into the desert—

stockings that walked to Syria in 1915.

On the rocks some ewes and rams   

graze in the outer dark.

The manes of the shoreline undo your hair.   

A sapphire ring is fingerless.

The weed and algae are floating like a bed,   

and the bloodless gulls—

whose breaths would stink of all of us   

if we could kiss them on the beaks—

are gnawing on the dead.

The immigrant hospital on Ellis Island