July 25, 2025: “My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead,” Day Off, “Why I Swore Off Porn”

I’m not sure I’d want to speak with ghosts.  I think it would be either really terrifying, or really annoying.  There are always things left unsaid when a person passes—unspoken “goodbyes” or “I loves yous” or “Don’t forget to unplug the toasters.”  I’m just not sure I’d want to be the conduit for all those messages from the beyond.

Sharon Olds’ has a close encounter with her father’s ghost . . . 

My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead

by: Sharon Olds

I seem to have woken up in a pot-shed, 

on clay, on shards, the glitter paths 

of slugs kiss-crossing my body. I don't know 

where to start, with this grime on me. 

I take the spider glue-net, plug 

of the dead, out of my mouth, let's see 

if where I have been I can do this. 

I love your feet. I love your knees, 

I love your our my legs, they are so 

long because they are yours and mine 

both. I love your—what can I call it, 

between your legs, we never named it, the 

glint and purity of its curls. I love 

your rear end, I changed you once, 

washed the detritus off your tiny 

bottom, with my finger rubbed 

the oil on you; when I touched your little 

anus I crossed wires with God for a moment. 

I never hated your shit—that was 

your mother. I love your navel, thistle 

seed fossil, even though 

it's her print on you. Of course I love 

your breasts—did you see me looking up 

from within your daughter's face, as she nursed? 

I love your bony shoulders and you know I 

love your hair, thick and live 

as earth. And I never hated your face, 

I hated its eruptions. You know what I love? 

I love your brain, its halves and silvery 

folds, like a woman's labia. 

I love in you 

even what comes 

from deep in your mother—your heart, that hard worker, 

and your womb, it is a heaven to me, 

I lie on its gentle hills and gaze up 

at its rosy vault. 

I have been in a body without breath, 

I have been in the morgue, in fire, in the slagged 

chimney, in the air over the earth, 

and buried in the earth, and pulled down 

into the ocean—where I have been 

I understand this life, I am matter, 

your father, I made you, when I say now that I love you 

I mean look down at your hand, move it, 

that action is matter's love, for human 

love go elsewhere.

I have had dreams/visions, like Olds, of waking up in strange places and speaking with a long-dead loved one—most of the time, one of my sisters or my mother.  I’ve found those dreams both comforting and disturbing, depending on the loved one’s words.

I always feel surrounded by my dead.  In fact, I sometimes talk to them.  Not in the Whoopi Goldberg Ghost way.  I just have one-sided conversations with them when I’m struggling with a decision.  My mother and older sister were always sounding boards for me when I needed advice.  

I do believe in ghosts/spirits/souls.  From a Christian standpoint, I was brought up to believe we all have souls that survive our fleshly time on this planet.  From a Stephen King fanboy standpoint, I will never knowingly step foot in a haunted house.  From a metaphysical standpoint, I have experienced moments of intense connection with the spirit of a place/person.  (I defy anyone to visit the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor and not feel the weight of all the lives that were lost there.)

The image of my dearly departeds constantly floating near me gives me pause.  Think about everything you do on a daily basis.  Would you want your mother or father to witness all the things you do in a 24-hour period?  As a teenage boy, I couldn’t imagine my maternal grandmother watching me at night in my bedroom.  The very thought was enough to make me celibate.

Nowadays, I’m comforted by the growing list of ghosts who surround me daily.  (As you get older, more and more ghosts join that throng.)  It’s like I have my own team of angelic lawyers to argue my case with the Almighty.  If I’m doing something that requires privacy, I figure my dead are smart enough to practice some otherworldly discretion.

I took the day off work, so I’ve had a lot of time to write and think today, which can be both good and bad.  I worked on my poetry manuscript, and I practiced church music for this weekend.  At the entrance to one of the churches, there’s a lovely flower garden with statues of angels and Jesus and Mary.  The temperature was close to 90 degrees, and blooms were vibrant and fragrant.  I stood outside for several minutes, just inhaling and thinking how much my mother would have loved the scene.  It almost felt like her ghost was standing right beside me, admiring the orange and while petals.  

Saint Marty wrote a poem about good and bad choices, based on the following two prompts from The Daily Poet:

July 24:  Write a poem in which the title begins with “Why.”  Examples:  “Why I’d Like to Meet My Maker,” “Why I Would Never Dye My Hair.”  In her poem “Why She Would Take Off Her Shoes Before Jumping From the Golden Gate Bridge,” Annette Spaulding-Convy writes:  Maybe the water / / is a temple and She doesn’t want / / to bring the road’s dirt / / inside.  Push to move past expected responses to strange and imaginative ones.  For extra credit, compose your poem in couplets.

July 25:  Write a poem wherein you swear off something or someone.  Examples:  caffeine, booze, porn, Sex in the City reruns, a toxic boyfriend or girlfriend, a drug-addicted child.  Tell us specifically (with concrete images) why you are saying goodbye to a bad habit or toxic alliance, then show us how your decision will change your life for the better.

Why I Swore Off Porn

by: Martin Achatz

It was challenging in high school, like getting

someone to buy me beer from White’s Liquor Pantry.

The girls always looked sad, as if

Charlotte hadn’t saved Wilbur in the end.

And the guys always looked like Darren Vanhoff

who tried to drown me in swim class.

There were too many grammar errors—

modifiers dangling in inappropriate places.

Princess Leia, in her metal bikini, strangled

Jabba the Hutt with her BDSM chains.

They’re aren’t many good words that rhyme

with it:  corn, shorn, mourn, forlorn, 

and Gorn, that lizard man Captain Kirk

fought in between getting it on with all

those alien pole dancers in sequins, 

trying to save their worlds from oblivion.

Everyone in the pictures and videos have

mothers, fathers, little brothers, maybe goldfish.

Hi, my name is Martin, and my turn-ons are someone

washing my dinner dishes, afternoon naps, salted caramels.

August 8: "Am I Not Among the Early Risers," Grace, Buckshot with Light

Mary Oliver asks . . . 

Am I Not Among the Early Risers

by:  Mary Oliver

Am I not among the early risers

and the long-distance walkers?

Have I not stood, amazed, as I consider

the perfection of the morning star

above the peaks of the houses, and the crowns of the trees

     blue in the first light?

Do I not see how the trees tremble, as though

     sheets of water flowed over them

thought it is only wind, that common thing,

     free to everyone and everything?

Have I not thought, for years, what it would be

worthy to do, and then gone off, barefoot and with a silver pail,

     to gather blueberries,

thus coming, as I think, upon a right answer?

What will ambition do for me that the fox, appearing suddenly

at the top of the field,

her eyes sharp and confident as she stared into mine,

has not already done?

What countries, what visitations,

     what pomp

would satisfy me as thoroughly as Blackwater Woods

on a sun-filled morning, or, equally, in the rain?

Here is an amazement--once I was twenty years old and in

     every motion of my body there was a delicious ease,

and in every motion of the green earth there was

     a hint of paradise,

and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.

Above the modest house and the palace--the same darkness.

Above the evil man and the just, the same stars.

Above the child who will recover and the child who will

     not recover, the same energies roll forward,

from one tragedy to the next and from one foolishness to the next.

     I bow down.

Have I not loved as though the beloved could vanish at any moment,

or become preoccupied, or whisper a name other than mine

     in the stretched curvatures of lust, or over the dinner table?

Have I ever taken good fortune for granted?

Have I not, every spring, befriended the swarm that pours forth?

Have I not summoned the honey-man to come, to hurry,

     to bring with him the white and comfortable hive?

And while I waited, have I not leaned close, to see everything?

Have I not been stung as I watched their milling and gleaming,

     and stung hard?

Have I not been ready always at the iron door,

     not knowing to what country it opens--to death or to more life?

Have I ever said that the day was too hot or too cold

or the night too long and as black as oil anyway,

or the morning, washed blue and emptied entirely

     of the second-rate, less than happiness

as I stepped down from the porch and set out along 

the green paths of the world?

I think the key question that Oliver asks in this poem is this:  "Have I taken good fortune for granted?"

Really, that encompasses all the other questions she asks, from whether she's an early riser to whether she's been stung hard by a bee.  It's almost as if Oliver is trying to remind herself of all of the grace she's experienced in her life.  And the thing about grace is that it's not something that you earn.  Grace is simply given, with no strings attached, to people who live in modest houses and palaces, to evil men and just men, to the child who will live and the child who will die.  

So, what grace have I experienced today?  Because everyone experiences grace every day of their lives.  The problem is that, unless you're actively looking for it, grace is like the sun hiding behind a tree.  It's visible in the glittering leaves, in the clouds buckshot with light, but most people simply don't look up long enough to see it.

I had a pretty uneventful day.  Nothing terrible happened.  Nothing wonderful happened.  I just worked, ate, graded essays, ate some more, and took my puppy for a walk.  Unfailingly normal.  Henry David Thoreau wrote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them."  For Thoreau, nothing could be worse than going through life with our dreams locked safely inside ourselves, safely unfulfilled.

I'm not saying that my existence is one of quiet desperation.  On the contrary, I have been the recipient of so much grace in my life that I feel as though I should give some of it back.  I have a beautiful wife whom I love.  Two beautiful children who fill me with pride.  A puppy who rolls on her back and lets me scratch her belly any time.  Extended family and friends who love me, despite all of my failings.  A job that is full of books and poetry and authors and music and art and movies.  And a gift for writing that has given me some pretty amazing experiences.  (I've had personal conversations with Joy Harjo and Natasha Trethewey and Diane Seuss, for God's sake.)

That's a ridiculous amount of grace for one person to receive.

Sure, I struggle, too.  Grace isn't an antidote for pain.  Grace is what makes the pain bearable.  August 19 will be the eighth anniversary of my sister Sally's death.  Grief doesn't ever really go away.  It's a lifelong process of saying goodbye.  So, I get sad every once in a while, especially this time of year.  Yet, I still have grace, that sun hiding in the trees.

Tonight, I watched Ghost with my son.  He'd never seen it before.  When it go to the final scene, where Patrick Swayze says goodbye to Demi Moore, I started crying.  As the credits were rolling, my son stood up and said, "That movie was alright."  Then he went back upstairs to his bedroom.

But my son spent time with me this evening.  He sat and watched an old (to him) movie.  Maybe he thought it was corny or stupid or predictable, but he didn't say these things aloud.  Instead, this surly 14-year-old boy just graced me with his company because he knew I needed it.

For Saint Marty, that is an unchained melody.

October 26: Poetic Halloween Inspiration, Paisley Rekdal, "Bats"

I know some of my disciples have missed my Poet of the Week feature, and I apologize for its absence.  I have no real excuse, unless laziness counts.  In truth, by the end of my days, I have found myself fairly exhausted, unable to formulate thought or wit into anything worth reading.

However, this week, I will try to provide a little poetic Halloween inspiration, starting with the poem below.  The Great Pumpkin arrives in a little less than a week.  There are pumpkins to carve, scary movies to watch, and candy to consume.  Perhaps a ghost or two will show up.  Maybe a zombie Bob Dylan.

Join Saint Marty and Linus in the pumpkin patch.

Bats

by:  Paisley Rekdal

unveil themselves in dark.
They hang, each a jagged,

silken sleeve, from moonlit rafters bright
as polished knives.  They swim


the muddled air and keen
like supersonic babies, the sound


we imagine empty wombs might make
in women who can't fill them up.

A clasp, a scratch, a sigh.
They drink fruit dry.

And wheel, against feverish light flung hard
upon their faces,

in circles that nauseate.
Imagine one at breast or neck,

patterning a name in driblets of iodine
that spatter your skin stars.

They flutter, shake like mystics.
They materialize.  Revelatory

as a stranger's underthings found tossed
upon the marital bed, you tremble

even at the thought.  Asleep,
you tear your fingers 

and search the sheets all night.

 
Boo!