July 21: Flurry of Packing, Sandra Beasley, "Love Poem for Wednesday"

Tonight, when I get home, my wife will be in a flurry of packing.  Washing clothes.  Making lists.  Every once in a while asking me a question that she already has the answer to, like "Do you think I should pack two or three cans of Pringles?"  (If you're interested, my answer is always, "Please don't over pack for this trip like you do for every trip we take.")  My wife likes to prepare for every contingency, including a world-wide Pringles shortage and the extermination of humankind by a killer meteor.

I will attempt to help, but, ultimately, I will fail.  My wife is very serious about packing and preparing.  I am a little less strict.  As long as I have my insulin, a book, my journals, a fountain pen, and clean underwear, I'm pretty much all set.

It's Thursday night.  I don't have to work tomorrow.  It's the start of my long weekend.  Long drive ahead of me.  Five or six hours.  I don't really like long car trips, but I like being some place different.  I loved Waikiki and Big Sur and the Wisconsin Dells.  Some day, I want to visit Italy, Rome in particular.  Maybe it will happen.

I have a poem tonight from Sandra Beasley about Wednesdays.  It's a good poem.  A poem I wish I'd written.  I will be packing my laptop for this trip.  Doing some remote posts.  Maybe I'll write a love poem for Friday or Saturday.

Who knows?  Marty may end up as a Saint of the Week on some writer's blog.

Love Poem for Wednesday

by:  Sandra Beasley

You’re the day after Tuesday, before eternity.
You’re the day we ran out of tomatoes
and used tiny packets of ketchup instead.

You are salt, no salt, too much salt, a hangover.
You hold the breath of an abandoned cave.
Sometimes you surprise me with your

aurora borealis and I’ll pull over to watch you;
I’ll wait in the dark shivering fields of you.
But mostly, not. My students don’t care for you

or your lessons from the life of a minor god.
Can you hit the high C in our anthem?
Can you bench press a national disaster?

I fear for you, Wednesday. Your papers
are never in order. Your boots track in mud.
You’re the day I realized I didn’t even like him,

and the day I still said yes, yes, yes.
Sometimes I think you and I should elope,
and leave this house of cards to shuffle itself.

You are love, no love, too much love, a cuckold.
You are the loneliest of the three bears, hoping
to come home and find someone in your bed.

July 19: Searching for Beauty, Sandra Beasley, "Inventory"

I am sitting in my office at the university at the moment.  The hallway is dark.  The place shuts down at 4 p.m. during the summer.  Everybody goes home, and the lights, one by one, blink out.

I was looking for something beautiful to write about in this post.  I thought about sitting by a window and gazing out at Lake Superior.  I contemplated hiking into the forest and gazing at all the green around me.  Tried listening to music, reading some Sharon Olds.  Nothing is striking me as beautiful this evening.

Maybe I'm trying too hard.  There's an empty Diet Coke bottle sitting on my desk.  The fluorescent light is striking it, and it's glowing like an icicle on Christmas morning.  There's a ratty copy of Shakespeare's plays on my bookshelf, its binding frayed and torn, and it looks like it belongs in the Library of Alexandria.  My office mate has a picture of her two sons sitting on her desk in a filigreed metal frame.

Maybe beauty is always around.  I just don't take the opportunity to notice it very often.

Saint Marty is pretty hungry at the moment.  Food sounds beautiful.  A double cheeseburger would be the freakin' Sistine Chapel.

Inventory

by:  Sandra Beasley

We gaze into your eyes, eyes, eyes, eyes.

We forget the display is blind.

Your fanned tail really a cupped palm,

gathering each hen’s quiver to your ear,

your feathers the green-blue glamours of

reflective absence. No one

ever praises the ass of the peacock,

grin of quills that does the heavy lifting,

or how you eat anything from ants

to Styrofoam, from cheese to chicken.

Road roamer, flower devourer:

the one who’ll pick a fight with a goat.

Preen all you want. What I love of you

will be the bare undercarriage,

the calamus. I am done with beauty.

Only a blinking eye can measure the light.

Beauty's in the eye of the beholder . . .

July 18: Republican Convention, Poet of the Week, Sandra Beasley, "Let Me Count the Waves"

On this, the first day of the Republican convention in Cleveland where a political party is going to nominate an actual caricature for President of the United States, I had to find a Poet of the Week who made me laugh.  I found Sandra Beasley, thanks to Rita Dove who named her as a young poet to watch.

What you will read below is a sestina.  Notice the words repeating in a pattern.  Notice how Beasley stretches the lines and words in places.  Plus, she talks about Pringles.  What more could you want in a poem?

Saint Marty is going to try to avoid political talk this week.  He'll let the idiot in Cleveland speak for himself and offend as many people as possible.

Let Me Count the Waves

by:  Sandra Beasley

We must not look for poetry in poems.
                  —Donald Revell 

You must not skirt the issue wearing skirts.

You must not duck the bullet using ducks.

You must not face the music with your face.

Headbutting, don’t use your head. Or your butt.

You must not use a house to build a home,

and never look for poetry in poems.

In fact, inject giraffes into your poems.

Let loose the circus monkeys in their skirts.

Explain the nest of wood is not a home

at all, but a blind for shooting wild ducks.

Grab the shotgun by its metrical butt;

aim at your Muse’s quacking, Pringled face.

It’s good we’re talking like this, face to face.

There should be more headbutting over poems.

Citing an 80s brand has its cost but

honors the teenage me, always in skirts,

showing my sister how to Be the Duck

with a potato-chip beak. Take me home,

Mr. Revell. Or make yourself at home

in my postbellum, Reconstruction face—

my gray eyes, my rebel ears, all my ducks

in the row of a defeated mouth. Poems

were once civil. But war has torn my skirts

off at the first ruffle, baring my butt

or as termed in verse, my luminous butt.

Whitman once made a hospital his home.

Emily built a prison of her skirts.

Tigers roamed the sad veldt of Stevens’s face.

That was the old landscape. All the new poems

map the two dimensions of cartoon ducks.

We’re young and green. We’re braces of mallards,

not barrels of fish. Shoot if you must but

Donald, we’re with you. Trying to save poems,

we settle and frame their ramshackle homes.

What is form? Turning art to artifice,

trading pelts for a more durable skirt.

Even urban ducklings deserve a home.

Make way. In the modern: Make way, Buttface.

A poem is coming through, lifting her skirt.

Better than anything that's going on in Cleveland

January 30: Different Code, Santa Claus, Sandra Beasley, "August," Off the Top of My Head

When I was quite young I fondly imagined that all foreign languages were codes for English.  I thought that "hat," say, was the real and actual name of the thing, but that people in other countries, who obstinately persisted in speaking the code of their forefathers, might use the word "ibu," say to designate not merely the concept hat, but the English word "hat."  I knew only one foreign word, "oui," and since it had three letters as did the word for which it was a code, it seemed, touchingly enough, to confirm my theory.  Each foreign language was a different code, I figured, and at school I would eventually be given the keys to unlock some of the most important codes' systems.  Of course I knew that it might take years before I became so fluent in another language that I could code and decode easily in my head, and make of gibberish a nimble sense.  On the first day of my first French course, however, things rapidly took on an entirely unexpected shape.  I realized that I was going to have to learn speech all over again, word by word, one word at a time--and my dismay knew no bounds.

It's a completely kid thing to think.  The whole world, everything that is mysterious and confusing, is a coded message, and, as we get older, we are given the keys to these codes.  Suddenly, speaking Russian and Mandarin is as simple as doing a crossword puzzle or reading a map.  Inevitably, Annie Dillard learns the truth, as we all do:  the world is complicated and, at times, unknowable.

When I was a kid, I believed in Santa Claus a lot longer than most of my contemporaries.  While my friends begged their parents to buy them Commodore 64's and Atari game systems, I simply thought to myself "suckers!" and fired off a letter to the North Pole.  I was unwilling to let go of the idea of magic existing in the world.  Flying reindeer and a jolly Christmas elf with a bottomless bag of gifts.

Long about fifth grade (yes, fifth grade!), I had to let go of magic and, as Dillard, my dismay knew no bounds.  The world suddenly became, at once, smaller and larger.  More confusing.  Death and poverty.  Incredible wealth and incredible poverty.  And languages--all kind of languages--separating the peoples of the world.  I suddenly understood, in a much deeper way, the story of the Tower of Babel.  No code existed to unlock the divisions of country and religion and culture.  Santa Claus did not unite us all.

However, I still hold on to the idea, the possibility, of mystery.  I believe that the universe is divinely, infinitely miraculous.  That is the basis of hope, and hope is why I get out of bed in the morning, go to work, teach, read, write blog posts and poems.  I think that's what Santa Claus is all about, too.  Santa allows kids to put a face to the longings of their lives.  The empty holes.  Santa is mystery with a smile.  Hope with a big round belly, trimmed in red fur.

Yes, loss is a part of life (the burning up of the past, as in Sandra Beasley's poem below).  Phobias and fears are abundant (death, spiders in the shower).  However, each day is an opportunity for newness, for the blossoming of something beautiful and redemptive.

Maybe Saint Marty still believes in Santa Claus.

August

by:  Sandra Beasley

Sooner or later, the thing you value most will beg to be burned.
Trust me, says the phoenix, I'm immortal.  Watch your childhood
home--how the wires fray, how the baseboards splinter to tinder.
Your nights are split open by steam and the writhing of hoses.

Your sister learns to thicken gasoline with jelly, collects cannisters;
the man you love shares a mouthful of smoke with someone else.
Trust me.  Even Joan of Arc, age ten, tanned her arms as she tended
the sheep.  I'm immortal.  Tomorrow will rise to a full boil but still

you'll strip down, lay out, you'll slick the thin oil over your chest.
For six night before the city blazed Nero could not sleep, pacing
the palace balcony.  He fiddled to ease his nerves.  Pretty tune,
whispered Rome:  lips licked with flame, mouth readying to sing.

Off the Top of My Head

January 29: The Mockingbird, Tireless, Sandra Beasley, "The Experiment"

The birds have started singing in the valley.  Their February squawks and naked chirps are fully fledged now, and long lyrics fly in the air.  Birdsong catches in the mountains' rim and pools in the valley; it threads through forests, it slides down creeks.  At the house a wonderful thing happens.  The mockingbird that nests each year in the front-yard spruce strikes up his chant in high places, and one of those high places in my chimney.  When he sings there, the hollow chimney acts as a soundbox, like the careful emptiness inside a cello or violin, and the notes of the song gather fullness and reverberate through the house.  He sings a phrase and repeats it exactly; then he sings another and repeats that, then another.  The mockingbird's invention is limitless; he strews newness about as casually as a god.  He is tireless, too; toward June he will begin his daily marathon at two in the morning and scarcely pause for breath until eleven at night.  I don't know when he sleeps.

I love this paragraph about birds and birdsong.  I think it appeals to me right now because it is about the coming of spring.  A thaw in the air.  The return of boisterous life.  Whistles.  Chirps.  Squawks.  And the mockingbird, this creature that copies and repeats, invents and reinvents, over and over, from before daybreak until after nightfall.  A tireless harbinger of newness.

I sometimes feel like that mockingbird.  Not the prophet-of-spring bird.  No, I associate myself more with the up-before-dawn-and-work-until-midnight bird.  Dillard says that she doesn't know when the mockingbird sleeps.  I get that.  This morning, I got up at 4:45 to shovel snow.  Then I worked all day and took care of my kids most of the evening and night.  It is 10 p.m. now, and I just got back home a little less than an hour ago.  Probably won't get to bed until around midnight.  Are you seeing what I'm saying?  I AM that mockingbird.

I'm used to being near exhaustion around this time.  Some nights, I can barely keep my eyes open.  I sit on the couch and fall asleep during the ten o'clock news.  I simply don't have time to slow down or be tired during the day.  If I were a mockingbird, my call would go something like this:  "Too much to do!  Too much to do!  Too much to do!"

I am not complaining.  I am just bone tired of this week of snow and shoveling.  Tomorrow (Saturday) I get to sleep in until 7 a.m.  That might not sound like a big deal, but, for a person who usually rises between 4:30 and five every morning, it's a very big deal.  Those extra two hours of slumber are Rip Van Winkle hours.  Deep and long.

That's the extent of my wisdom tonight--naps are good.  I am going to leave the inspiration to Poet of the Week Sandra Beasley.

Time for Saint Marty to close his eyes, at least until Jimmy Fallon starts or I wake up twenty years in the future.

The Experiment

by:  Sandra Beasley

My mother mixed sugar and water in a jar.

I laid the thin sheet of cotton down on garden stone.

Her brush trailed islands across the paper--

one, two, a Fiji, a Hokkaido,

coastlines she'd seen only in magazines--

while I caught eight caterpillars and hunkered down,

cupping their fuzzy, blind blue, and as she lifted her brush

I fed them onto the edge of the page.

Then, a bath.  A card game.  Sandwiches.  Braiding.

Years later, she'll say she had never wanted children.

When we checked again the caterpillars were gone,

sugared spots chewed away.  Our map of hunger,

she said, holding the latticed sheet up to the sun--

light casting an archipelago across her face.

Just because it makes me laugh...

January 28: Upside-down in the Sky, Snow, Sandra Beasely, The Story of My family

It snowed.  It snowed all yesterday and never emptied the sky, although the clouds looked so low and heavy they might drop all at once with a thud.  The light is diffuse and hueless, like the light on paper inside a pewter bowl.  The snow looks light and the sky dark, but in fact the sky is lighter than the snow.  Obviously the thing illuminated cannot be lighter than its illuminator.  The classical demonstration of this point involves simply laying a mirror flat on the snow so that it reflects in its surface the sky, and comparing by sight his value to that of the snow.  This is all very well, even conclusive, but the illusion persists.  The dark is overhead and the light at my feet; I'm walking upside-down in the sky.

Snow has a way of disorienting a person, as Dillard points out.  The sky dark as a skunk belly, the ground light as a winter weasel.  The universe inverted by the weather.  Of course, it's a visual trick--a matter of the reflection of daylight on the surface of freshly falling snow.  That doesn't make it any less of a (pardon my language) mind fuck.

That particular condition ruled the day in my little corner of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  Light and dark playing that winter shell game.  I woke up to a whole lot of snow.  I shoveled my driveway in the early morning dark, and, indeed, all the illumination seemed to be coming from the drifts of freshly fallen powder.  If I hadn't been so annoyed about having to shovel at five o'clock in the morning, I may have appreciated the beauty and strangeness of the phenomenon.

And the snow continued all . . . day .  . . long.  It didn't let up.  By the time I got home after work, all of my shoveling work from the morning had been undone.  I had to spend yet another hour moving snow.  And again, the sky was a chalkboard slate, and the ground was a dry erase board.  It really did feel, as Dillard says, like I was walking upside-down in the sky.  Or that the sky had fallen, and I was pushing around pieces of it.

My book club met tonight.  It didn't go quite as planned.  Because of the snow, the author of the book we read this month had to cancel.  He cited wind and blowing snow and an abiding phobia of driving in such conditions. 

So, the members of my book club cane.  We ate, gossiped, ate some more, and talked about the book.  Of course, the author's absence made the discussion a little more digressive than usual, topics ranging from work problems to home problems.  We talked about headcheese and grape sherbet.  About obsession and loss.  And that was in just the first five minutes. 

The author is rescheduling for next month, and I am ready to go to bed.  I know that posts this week have been a little sparse.  I apologize for that.  Too much to do,  not enough time to do it in.  This weekend, more fun:  I have a huge project to complete--my annual evaluation and promotion request.  It's a pretty big deal.  I can't drop this ball.

Saint Marty has a poem this evening about light and family.

The Story of My Family

by:  Sandra Beasley

You're a tooth I tongue and tongue,
tasting blood as you loosen,

testing the sweet root of the hole.
The shudder and catch, the god spit,

and though I dip the bone in gold,
no lover wants to wear a necklace

of you.  Carry you in my pocket
and you smolder.  Sow the field with you

and you sprout in hours, white tops
thrusting through the meal soil--

one book says a bean pushes its husk
away, hauling the used body to the surface,

one book says the army is born whole,
fingers scratching toward any light.

Break out the shovels . . .

January 26: Merton's Prayer, Battling Time, Poet of the Week, Sandra Beasley, "Holiday"

My God, I look at the creek.  It is the answer to Merton's prayer, "Give us time!"  It never stops.  If I seek the senses and skill of children, the information of a thousand books, the innocence of puppies, even the insights of my own city past, I do so only, solely, and entirely that I might look well at the creek.  You don't run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets.  You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled.  You'll have fish left over.  The creek is the one great giver.  It is, by definition, Christmas, the incarnation.  This old rock planet gets the present for a present on its birthday every day.

Dillard is all about time.  The passing of the seasons.  Winter giving way to spring.  No matter how hard we pray, time is simply slipping away all the time, like the water at Tinker Creek.  The present, basically, is all we get.  The past and future are simply different versions of present-was and present-will-be.

Sorry about my absence last night.  Thomas Merton prays, "Give us time!"  That's exactly what I needed last night and tonight.  More time.  But the clock beat me.  At 11 p.m., I was brain dead.  I fell into bed and went to sleep almost immediately.

I've been battling time this evening, as well.  Time is winning.  It is nearly 11:30 p.m. now, and I know that, in a few hours, I will hear the plows come roaring up and down my street, throwing a good foot of snow into my driveway.  I need to get to sleep.

This week, I have chosen Sandra Beasely as Poet of the Week.  And tonight's poem is about Christmas, since we only have 333 more shopping days left.

Saint Marty is feeling the crunch.

Holiday

by:  Sandra Beasley

The tree is a spruce monster, refusing to fit--
so my father decapitates it with a handsaw.
We drape the body with tinsel before
he weaves in bulbs, their white and steady light,
and sneaks in his blinkers of blue and green.
This year there are strikes:  my sister refuses
to open her advent calendar until he sees a doctor;
my father refuses to see a doctor, popping Excedrin;
my mother votes for a cruise, her sister's house
anywhere she won't have to hang ornaments.
We thumb through her maps and clippings,
but it's that familiar silver that fills our palms,
tinsel we'll be picking from the carpet until May.
On the Eve we open one gift, make one toast, feast:
curried vegetables, green beans and bacon,
wine and more wine, always a knife sharp enough
to cut the roast of our hearts.  A lover said I've never
seen people trying so hard to make each other happy
manage to make each other so miserable.  Clearly, I said,
you do not understand the true meaning of Christmas.
Tonight we'll wrap gifts until dawn, alone
in our many rooms.  The house quiet except for
my father's cough; except for twenty-five chocolates
rattling behind twenty-five unopened windows,
except for my sister stringing up angels, in one hand
their tiny napes of neck and in the other hand, a hook.