May 31: Ound, Whale Questions, Ray

And now, something about the death of a whale (no, we're not going back to Moby-Dick) . . .

Another thing that got forgotten was the fact that against all possibility a sperm whale had suddenly been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet.

And since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this poor innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity as a whole before it then had to come to terms with not being a whale any more.

This is a complete record of its thoughts from the moment it began its life till the moment it ended it.

Ah . . .!  What's happening? it thought.

Er, excuse me, who am I?

Hello?

Why am I here?  What's my purpose in life?

What do I mean by who am I?

Calm down, get a grip now . . .oh! this is an interesting sensation, what is it?  It's a sort of . . . yawning, tingling sensation in my . . . my . . . well, I suppose I'd better start finding names for things if I want to make any headway in what for the sake of what I shall call an argument I shall call the world, so let's call it my stomach.

Good.  Ooooh, it's getting quite strong.  And hey, what about this whistling roaring sound going past what I'm suddenly going to call my head?  Perhaps I can call that . . . wind!  Is that a good name?  It'll do . . . perhaps I can find a better name for it later when I've found out what it's for.  It must be something very important because there certainly seems to be a hell of a lot of it.  Hey!  What's this thing?  This . . . let's call it a tail--yeah, tail.  Hey!  I can really thrash it about pretty good, can't I?  Wow!  Wow!  That feels great!  Doesn't seem to achieve very much but I'll probably find out what it's for later on.  Now, have I built up any coherent picture of things yet?

No.  

Never mind, hey, this is really exciting, so much to find out about, so much to look forward to.  I'm quite dizzy with anticipation.

Or is it the wind?

There really is a lot of that now, isn't there?

And wow!  Hey!  What's this thing suddenly coming toward me very fast?  Very, very fast.  So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide-sounding name like . . .ow . . ound . . . round . . . ground!  That's it!  That's a good name--ground!

I wonder if it will be friends with me?


And the rest, after a sudden wet thud, was silence.

There are many things that make a person reevaluate their lives, ask the whale-big questions like "Who am I?" and "Why am I here" and "What is my purpose?"  Being born is one of those things, I suppose.  Babies coming to terms with no longer being in utero, having to begin the messy work of breathing and crying and being hungry.  Then there's starting kindergarten and all the separation anxiety that goes along with that.  Of course there's the whole falling in love and getting married, which makes a person re-prioritize goals and ambitions.  Then becoming a parent, which again forces an examination of goals and ambitions.  And, of course, there's high school graduation.

I am writing this post one day after I sat in a gymnasium and watched my daughter matriculate from her high school.  I will say this about the experience:  it was wonderful and awful at the same time.  I loved celebrating the success of my little girl, everything that she has accomplished in the first twelve years of her schooling.  That was the wonderful part.  Then there was sitting in the bleachers, feeling like I was attending the wake of my daughter's childhood.  That was the awful part.

Now, if you are one of the faithful readers of this blog, you are probably rolling your eyes, thinking, "Oh my God, he's going to write about his daughter again!  He needs to get over himself and move on!"  I understand that reaction.  After all, the whole month of May, I have been preoccupied with all of these last-days-of-high-school moments.  On the other hand, if I was writing a Christmas blog, would you tell me, "All you talk about is Christmas trees and Christmas presents and Christmas movies!!  Why can't you say something about Halloween or Kwanzaa???!!!"  This blog is about my life, and my life (and heart) has been full of my daughter.  So, yes, this is going to be another post about my first born receiving her diploma.

It's also going to be about the passing of a person I knew and admired.  When I was in high school, I had the good fortune of knowing a man named Ray.  Ray was a grade ahead of me, and he was one of the funniest, warmest, most talented people that I have ever known.  Ray's main passion was drama club.  He was a highlight in almost every school play and musical.  When he graduated high school, he carried that passion with him into college, and he became a mainstay in the local university's productions.  He went on to be a theater professor, passing on his love of the stage to another generation of young people.  I'm going to steal a phrase here, but it really is true--everybody loved Raymond.

It has been many years since I have seen Ray.  Probably over a decade.  Yet, I always thought that the world was a better place because he was in it.  Simply put, he was a really good guy.  Yesterday, I found out that Ray had died.  That has made me even more reflective about the passage of time and the importance of always living the best life possible.  Taking advantage of every possible minute.

My daughter just walked out the door with her boyfriend to attend a classmate's graduation party.  She was a little exhausted from yesterday's events, but she was also really happy.  Her whole life is stretching out before her, full of all kinds of possibilities.  I want to tell her that, whether she's a anesthesiologist or a kindergarten teacher or a short order cook, she needs to understand what's really important.  It's not money or travel or fame or prestige.

No, it's about living life like Ray did.  Pursuing your passion,  Being kind to everyone.  Leaving each person you encounter a little happier.  Making the world a better place because you existed.

That's the best way to answer those big questions.

Who am I?  I am Saint Marty.

Why am I here?  Saint Marty is here to be a poet, teacher, husband, and father.

What is my purpose?  Saint Marty's purpose is somehow to be a light in the window on a dark night.

Rest in peace, Ray.

March 2: Mrs. Mildred Sink, Telling Stories, Matthew Gavin Frank, "Kepler's Last Law"

One day I was talking about snakes to Mrs. Mildred Sink, who operates a switchboard.  A large pane separated us, and we were talking through a circular hole in the glass.  She was seated in a dark room little bigger than a booth.  As we talked, red lights on her desk would flash.  She would glance at them, then back at me, and, finishing her point with careful calmness, she would fix on me a long, significant look to hold my attention while her hand expertly sought the button and pushed it.  In this way she handled incoming calls and told me her snake story.

When she was a girl, she lived in the country just north of here.  She had a brother four years old.  One bright summer day her brother and her mother were sitting quietly in the big room of the log cabin.  Her mother had her sewing in her lap and was bent over it in concentration.  The little boy was playing with wooden blocks on the floor.  "Ma," he said, "I saw a snake."  "Where?"  "Down by the spring."  The woman stitched the hem of a cotton dress, gathering the material with her needle and drawing it smooth with her hand.  The little boy piled his blocks carefully, this way and that.  After a while he said, "Ma, it's too dark in here.  I can't see."  She looked up and the boy's leg was swollen up as big around as his body.

Mrs. Sink nodded at me emphatically and then heeded the flashing light on the panel before her.  She turned away; this caller was taking time.  I waved and caught her eye; she waved, and I left.

Yes, I know that's a incredibly long passage.  But the story is so good.  The way that Dillard sets it up, talking with Mrs. Sink through a hole in a window.  The tale of the snake, starting so innocently and ending with that image:  the four-year-old boy dying in front of his mother.  (Make no mistake--the boy died.)  It's thrilling and terrifying to read at the same time.  And then Mrs. Sink just goes back to the switchboard.

I love a good story.  Right now, I am sitting in my office at the university.  It is spring break, so I believe that I'm probably the only person in the English Department.  It's almost 7 p.m.  I have been here about an hour and a half, doing work for the online class I'm taking.  (The instructor of the class told me the class would take about five hours per week.  I think I spent five hours just doing the week's readings.  This is going be a loooooong class.)

Whenever I'm in the English Department in the evening, I think of my friend, Ray, who used to the be the Department Head.  You may remember that Ray died of a massive heart attack the night before Thanksgiving in 2014.  Well, he's on my mind a lot when I'm sitting in my office.  For many people, Ray was the English Department.  A generous, funny, fair man.  He loved this place.

And thinking of Ray makes me think of my sister, Sally, who passed away in August, 2015.  I miss both of these people a great deal.  Ray was a part of my life for almost 25 years.  Sal wasn't just my sister.  She was my boss for 17 years.  Ten hours a day, we were together.  I sometimes still expect to see her car parked in its normal spot when I go to work.  She always parked in the same place.

I remember the first day I went to work after my sister died.  I was standing by a window, staring out into the parking lot, and I swear I saw my sister walking in the distance, wearing her blue hoodie and blue scrubs.  I looked once, looked away.  When I looked back, she was gone.

The first night that I was in my office at the university after Ray died, I was absorbed in some task at my desk.  The lights in the English Department are motion-activated.  After about ten minutes of inactivity, they turn off.  The hallway that night had been dark for quite some time.  As I was sitting at my desk, I felt like somebody was standing by my office door.  I looked up.  Nobody was there.  Suddenly, the hallway lights went on.  I got up and walked to my door.  Nobody was in the hallway.

You may be wondering why I'm telling you these stories.  Snakes.  Death.  Ghosts.  Well, first, I like telling stories about my friend and my sister.  It makes me feel like they're still with me in a way.  Second, I've been a little melancholy this afternoon, thinking about where I am right now in my life.  Third, I'm procrastinating about grading some papers.  The longer I make this post, the longer I can put off picking up my red pen.

The light just went out in the hallway of the English Department,  It's a little after seven in the evening now.  I'm sure the sun has set, and the cold night is getting colder. 

Saint Marty can no longer avoid the inevitable end of this post, except with a poem...

Kepler's Last Law

by:  Matthew Gavin Frank

The gargoyles with their frosted hair
guard the entrance to the library.

They are brother and sister, coffee-
stained, their muscular necks, things

under which teenagers still kiss
reading up with flapping fingers

to write their names.  From below,
my sister tells me, a fang is only

a small circle, a picture of the sun
in the central color pages

of a children's book about astronomy--
the one my mother bought me,

my seventh birthday, hoping
I wold go into the sciences,

unearth the skull of some Midwestern
dinosaur, polish it like a pearl.

Tell her that, in every cornfield,
is an ellipse that cries when it moos.

This is, after all, a law
of conservation, the orbit of her hand

as she bakes mandelbrot with chocolate chips
for the holidays, the finished scones

cooling on a sheet pan subject
to the hard gravitation

of room temperature.  Their smoke
loses itself in the space of a yellow

chandelier, the small extinction
of heat.  My sister,

angry after I dropped her
dollhouse family down the bathroom sink,

burned my book in the snow,
the chapter on Mars having outlasted

the fattest of the Jovians, the unspeakable
cold of the milk.  I knew even then

that she changed my life,
that my heart was not a good one--

a silk handkerchief, a bony
hand--an argument with genetics

I could not win, my body
stubbornly Aristotelian, still believing that it,

like the Earth used to be, was a fulcrum.
(Kepler knows:  here, an eraser is hard

to come by).
This pressure on my throat,

tightening now as I turn my back
on food, pass into pages, must be

my daughter, unborn, writing her name
on my breath.

Somewhere, in warm, warm, kitchens . . .

The hardest thing the Earth asks of us,
with its smells of white flour, requires

not the tractor, but remembering.

Yes, another weird cartoon to laugh at . . .

January 7: A Few Items, Birthday Card, Letting Go

But most sorrowfully, there were a few items kept hidden in a closet that related to his son--a white leatherbound New Testament, a baptismal card, a pile of paperbacks, and a new watch, never used, that had been purchased as his Christmas present at Macy's the afternoon before his death.

I understand Edward Ives' inability to let go of these items belonging to his son.  Throughout the novel, Ives sinks deeper and deeper into depression over the murder of his son.  It's devastating to read.  He simply cannot move past this tragic loss.  He holds onto his son's belongings, frozen, unable to let go.


I think I'm a lot like Ives.  I love the sentimentality of Christmas.  The lights and music and church services.  And I have a hard time letting go.  For instance, I shared the same birth date as my friend, Ray, who passed away just before Thanksgiving.  Every year, we gave each other birthday cards, trying to find the funniest or most inappropriate.  A couple weeks ago, I found the card Ray gave me in October.  The last card.  I've been carrying it around ever since.  Every once in a while, I'll take it out and read the personal message he wrote on the inside.  It makes me smile and feel sad at the same time.

Letting go is tough.  I have all the diaries and journals saved from the time I was in middle school.  I've never reread them, probably never will.  They simply reside in a box in my closet.  Maybe, when I win the Nobel Prize in Literature, they might be valuable.  Or maybe not.  Perhaps I should pull a Franz Kafka and ask my wife or best friend to burn them after I've died, tragically, of consumption.  That way I don't have to do the letting go.

When I return to teaching next week, I'm going to put Ray's birthday card in my office.  I may even frame it.  Just to remind me of his snorting laugh, his kind spirit.  Letting go is a process, like sand being eroded from a beach.  It takes time.  Lots of it for me.

In the mean time, Saint Marty's got about 40 or 50 diaries/journals to keep hidden.

Not ready for this yet...

December 10: Another Miracle, Son's Christmas Program, Everyday Miracles

Next morning, Wilbur arose and stood beneath the web.  He breathed the morning air into his lungs.  Drops of dew, catching the sun, made the web stand out clearly.  When Lurvy arrived with breakfast, there was the handsome pig, and over him, woven neatly in block letters, was the word TERRIFIC.  Another miracle.

Miracles can happen every day.  Just ask Charlotte and Wilbur.  Sometimes, the miracles are astounding--a sunrise of salmon and pink over a frozen lake.  Sometimes the miracles are simple--a spiderweb in a door frame.  Lurvy has probably walked right by hundreds of miracles without a second glance.  Newborn goslings.  Fingers of frost in the pumpkin patch.  Charlotte simply makes Lurvy stop and take notice.


I am sitting in my classroom at the moment, handing back graded exams.  I just finished all of my final grades a couple of hours ago.  It's just a matter of data entry into the computer now.  Then the semester is over for me.  It's been a heck of a few months.  On the way down to the classroom, I walked by my friend Ray's dark office.  Dark.  Empty.  One of the last things Ray did for me was give me a graduate-level poetry workshop to teach next semester.  One of the last times I saw him, he smiled and said, "You're all set.  Enrollment's good."  Ray was a miracle in my life.

Tomorrow, I'm going to my son's school Christmas program.  I'm not working.  Took the whole day off.  I'm looking forward to simply relaxing, not worrying about anything.  That's going to be a miracle for me.  Watching my son sing with his classmates, that's going to be another miracle.  Having time to breathe, think, reflect.  All miracles.

I'm supremely grateful tonight for all of these things.  For Christmas programs.  Days off.  Poetry workshops.  Finished grading.  My friend Ray.

Saint Marty forgets to say thanks for the miracles in his life sometimes.  Hell, sometimes he doesn't even notice them.

You should expect miracles, too

VOTE FOR ME FOR U. P. POET LAUREATE (voting ends December 31):

U. P. Poet Laureate Voting 

December 4: This Announcement, Good News, Twice

For a moment after this announcement, the Arables and the Zuckermans were unable to speak or move.  Then Avery picked up a handful of straw and threw it high in the air and gave a loud yell.  The straw fluttered down like confetti into Fern's hair.  Mr. Zuckerman hugged Mrs. Zuckerman.  Mr. Arable kissed Mrs. Arable.  Avery kissed Wilbut.  Lurvy shook hands with everybody.  Fern hugged her mother.  Avery hugged Fern.  Mrs. Arable hugged Mrs. Zuckerman.

This passage is one of the happiest in the book.  The judges at the Fair have just announced Wilbur's award.  The narrative moves from utter defeat (Wilbur losing first prize to Uncle the pig) to utter joy (Wilbur receiving the judges' special commendation).  Wilbur has won.  Charlotte has won.

I have received some good news today.  Twice.  The first is that I am one of ten nominees for the title of U. P. Poet Laureate.  I don't stand a chance against the other nominees.  Most are very widely published, award-winning poets.  However, there is truth to the statement that it's just pretty cool to be nominated.  Now, people just have to go on the website and vote.

The other good news came in the mail today.  I received a letter from the editor of the magazine The MacGuffin, which recently accepted a couple of my poems.  The letter was thin, and I honestly thought it was a kill letter, which means that the editor decided, for whatever reason, not to publish my work.  That's what I was expecting.  I opened the letter:

"I am excited to let you know that the staff at The MacGuffin has nominated your poem "Without Words" for the 2015 Pushcart Prize!  Your work stands out as one of the best pieces we've published in 2014."

I was completely gobsmacked.  I stood in the middle of my living room, reading the letter over and over.  For the second year in a row, I am a Pushcart Prize nominee.  At the end of this really tough week of mourning and sadness, I actually felt joy tonight.  If I'd had some hay to throw in the air, I would have.  Instead, my book club met, and, during the course of the night, I drank several glasses of wine.  It was absolutely lovely.

Of course, I thought of my friend who passed away the day before Thanksgiving.  Last year, when I received news of my Pushcart nomination, Ray was one of the first people I e-mailed with the news.  When I saw him in the department the next day, he stopped me in the hall and said, "Marty, congratulations on the Pushcart nomination!  That's fantastic!"

Tonight, my friend/fellow writer, Matt, and I raised our glasses of wine to Ray.  Then, Matt smiled at me and said, "To the Pushcart, man.  Fucking awesome."

Saint Marty is genuinely happy tonight.  For the first time in about a week.

I'd like to thank everybody who made this day possible...