March 31: Like Heaven, All I Do Is Work, Mindless Fun

A man in a boxcar across the way called out through the ventilator that a man had just died in there.  So it goes.  There were four guards who heard him.  They weren't excited by the news.

"Yo, yo," said one, nodding dreamily.  "Yo, yo."

And the guard didn't open the car with the dead man on it.  They opened the next car instead, and Billy Pilgrim was enchanted by what was in there.  It was like heaven.  There was candlelight, and there were bunks with quilts and blankets heaped on them.  There was a cannonball stove with a steaming coffeepot on top.  There was a table with a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread and a sausage on it.  There were four bowls of soup.

After his long march, Billy gets a little glimpse of heaven.  Warm bunks.  A candlelit table with bread and wine and sausage and coffee.  It is a scene in direct contrast to the boxcars stuffed with prisoners of war, coughing and groaning and dying.  

I am sitting on my couch at about 9:30 at night, and it feels like heaven to me.  It is the first time I've really had to relax all day.  When I got off work (over eight hours answering phones), I threw myself into cleaning at my parents' house.  Another hour or so of work.  I am beat.  Nearly falling asleep.

In about an hour, I have to pick up my daughter from a friend's house.  And then I will be able to go to bed.  Tomorrow is going to be another long day.  My son has another wrestling tournament, and we have to get an early start.  Seven-thirty in the morning.  Right now, that does not sound very appealing to me.

It seems, sometimes, that all I do is work.  At the medical office.  At the university.  At home.  It never seems to end.  The only time I really sit down is when I'm too tired to do anything else.  Like now.  Next week, I will be taking a couple days off.  Friday and Monday.  We will be traveling to the Wisconsin Dells for a dance competition.  I am hoping for a few hours of mindless fun there.

Again, I'm not complaining.  Work is a blessing, too.  I just wish I wasn't blessed with so much of it.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for a comfortable couch that fits his ass well.

February 24: Adam and Eve, Pablo Neruda, Wrestling Tournament

Their commander was a middle-aged corporal--red-eyed, scrawny, tough as dried beef, sick of war.  He had been wounded four times--and patched up, and sent back to war.  He was a very good soldier--about to quit, about to find somebody to surrender to.  His bandy legs were thrust into golden cavalry boots which he had taken from a dead Hungarian colonel on the Russian front.  So it goes.

Those boots were almost all he owned in this world.  They were his home.  An anecdote.  One time, a recruit was watching him bone and wax those golden boots, and he held one up to the recruit and said, "If you look in there deeply enough, you'll see Adam and Eve."

Billy Pilgrim had not heard this anecdote.  But, lying on the black ice there, Billy stared into the patina of the corporal's boots, saw Adam and Even in the golden depths.  They were naked.  They were so innocent, so vulnerable, so eager to behave decently.  Billy Pilgrim loved them.

I love this little passage, with its almost magically real image of Adam and Eve in the commander's boots.  War and death.  Innocence and vulnerability.  Billy falling in love with them as he is flat on his back on the black ice of the frozen creek.

That's the way poetry happens, really.  In the middle of the shitstorm of life, something beautiful surfaces.  Today, I felt pretty lousy all day long.  Hot then cold.  Stuffed up nose then runny nose.  Full of energy then exhausted.  Right now, I feel like I could crawl under the covers and take a Rip Van Winkle nap.  And there is snow and snow and snow.

I'm looking for poetry tonight.  Having a hard time.  Perhaps if I I take some Nyquil, I will find poetry.  Neruda once wrote, "And it was at that age . . . Poetry arrived / in search of me.  I don't know, I don't know where / it came from, from winter or a river."  I have an idea for a poem I want to write for the poetry reading I'm giving this coming Tuesday.  I haven't had the energy to put pen to journal.  Still don't.  I'm waiting for poetry to arrive.

Tomorrow, my son has a wrestling tournament.  Maybe poetry will be there, cheering in the crowd.  In the afternoon, my daughter has a dance rehearsal.  Maybe poetry will be there in a leotard.  In the evening, church.  Poetry may be there, saying a few prayers.

I'm saying that I don't know when poetry is going to arrive.  I just have to keep an eye out.

Tonight, Saint Marty is thankful for . . .the possibility of meeting poetry at the concession stand.