June 1: "Of the Empire," Angry Poem, Lilacs

Mary Oliver goes a little medieval on humans . . . 

Of the Empire

by:  Mary Oliver

We will be known as a culture that feared death

and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity

for the few and cared little for the penury of the 

many.  We will be known as a culture that taught

and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke

little if at all about the quality of life for

people (other people), for dogs, for rivers.  All 

the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a

commodity.  And they will say that this structure

was held together politically, which it was, and

they will say also that our politics was no more

than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of

the heart, and that the heart, in those days,

was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

Yeah, Oliver is a little pissed.  I've been writing about her and her poetry for six months now, and today is the first time that I can say that.  This is an angry poem.  

Of course, she has every right to be mad.  Look at the inventory of mistakes and greed she provides.  Human beings fear death and adore power.  We care more about the welfare of the wealthy than the deprivations of the poor.  We amass things and ignore the quality of life of fellow planet travelers, dogs, and rivers.  And we put price tags on everything with hearts that are small little fists of meanness.

That's a pretty damning list.  Some of my disciples may take issue with a few of Oliver's assertions (or all of them).  That's okay.  You don't have to agree with her.  That's the beauty of living in a society governed by freedom of speech.  People have the right to say and think the dumbest or smartest shit they want.  I'm totally down with that.

It is around 9 p.m.  Outside, the temperature is still 77 degrees.  All of my lilac bushes are blooming.  I'm surrounded by purple sweetness.  If I were Mary Oliver, I wouldn't be typing this blog post.  I'd be standing in my backyard, basking in these first days of summer, listening to the peepers screaming in the dusk.  I may still do that.

Because that's what Mary would do.  When she felt discouraged or sad or disappointed with humanity, she turned to things that couldn't disappoint her:  her dogs, Blackwater Pond, meadowlarks, rivers, poetry.  No politics here.  Or accumulation of wealth.  Or greed.  Just nature doing what it needs to do in order to survive.

We suck at taking care of the world.  We've proven that, over and over, throughout history.  That's not misanthropic.  That's just plain truth, and that's Oliver's message tonight.  If you have a problem with this poem, then you're probably part of the problem and not the solution.

Please excuse Saint Marty now.  He's got some lilacs to smell.

May 27: "Sometimes," 90 Years, Tragedies and Miracles

Mary Oliver sometimes feels awe, sometimes sadness, sometimes love . . .  

Sometimes

by:  Mary Oliver

1. 

Something came up

out of the dark.

It wasn't anything I had ever seen before.

It wasn't an animal

     or a flower,

unless it was both.

Something came up out of the water,

     a head the size of a cat

but muddy and without ears.

I don't know what God is.

I don't know what death is.

But I believe they have between them

     some fervent and necessary arrangement.

2.

Sometimes

melancholy leaves me breathless.

3.

Later I was in a field full of sunflowers.

I was feeling the heat of midsummer.

I was thinking of the sweet, electric

     drowse of creation,

when it began to break.

In the west, clouds gathered.

Thunderheads.

In an hour the sky was filled with them.

In an hour they sky was filled

     with the sweetness of rain and the blast of lightning.

Followed by the deep bells of thunder.

Water from the heavens!  Electricity from the source!

Both of them mad to create something!

The lightning brighter than any flower.

The thunder without a drowsy bone it its body.

4.

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

5.

Two or three times in my life I discovered love.

Each time it seemed to solve everything.

Each time it solved a great many things

     but not everything.

You left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and 

thoroughly, solved everything.

6.

God, rest in my heart

and fortify me,

take away my hunger for answers,

let the hours play upon my body

like the hands of my beloved.

Let the cathead appear again--

the smallest of your mysteries,

some wild cousin of my own blood probably--

some cousin of my own wild blood probably,

in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.

7.

Death waits for me, I know it, around

     one corner or another.

This doesn't amuse me.

Neither does it frighten me.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.

It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.

I walked slowly, and listened

to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

I think this poem is one of the few by Oliver I've encountered where she admits to breathless melancholy.  She doesn't often speak of that kind of darkness.  Of course, she experienced sorrow and grief.  She was human, making her way through a broken world.

Even people who seem very in-touch with their spiritual sides aren't immune to sadness or doubt or fear.  Like everyone else, these emotions are often mixed up with wonder or joy or or awe.  For me, every day is a grab bag of feelings.  I may wake up tired and sad, move on to excited after breakfast, transition to bored or anxious post lunch, and end up stunned or confused by bedtime.

I'm like Oliver, standing on the shore of a pond, seeing something I can't quite identify emerge from and glide along the surface of the water.  Not a cat.  Not a lillypad.  It's a part of creation completely new to me, yet also as familiar as the scar on my pinky.

At church tonight, we celebrated the ninetieth birthday of a longtime parishioner.  She was in attendance with her extended family.  At the end of the Mass, the priest raised his arms and blessed her.  After Mass, she lingered at the front of the sanctuary, posing for pictures and basking in the love and attention.

This woman was born in 1933.  Adolf Hitler was just coming into power.  FDR was sworn in for his first term as President of the United States.  It was the height of the Great Depression, with the unemployment rate hovering around 25 percent.  That means one in four people didn't have jobs.  The original King Kong was the number one movie.  Prohibition was repealed.  

In her 90 years, she's experienced several wars, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, many genocides and famines, a worldwide energy crisis, race riots, global warming, and a deadly pandemic.  She's also witnessed humans walking on the surface of the moon, the rise of the Internet, Star Wars and Harry Potter, and the first African American to serve in the Oval Office.  

All lifetimes are filled with these kinds of tragedies and miracles.  Creation and apocalypse.  Sometimes, we don't even know how to describe or name these things.  Atom bomb.  Holocaust.  Apollo 11.  Google.  iPhone.  AIDS.  Artificial intelligence.  They're all catheads in the dark dinner-bowl of the pond.

Mary Oliver's three rules for living a lifetime are pretty simple and profound: 

1.  Pay attention.

2.  Be astonished.

3.  Tell about it.

Something astounding happens every day.  Small and large wonders.  

The lilacs in my backyard just started blooming.  I am surrounded by their scent.  Two days ago, they were just ideas, tiny little green fists waiting to beat the air up with beauty.  Tonight, my little portion of the world is drunk with purple.  

Saint Marty paid attention.  He's astonished.  Now, he's telling you about it. 

June 2: Delicacy and Precision, the Met, Lilacs

Merton on his godfather . . .

Then I would go back to my godfather's place, and we would have lunch in the dining room, sitting at the little table that always seemed to me so small and delicate that I was afraid to move for fear the whole thing would collapse and the pretty French dishes would smash on the floor and scatter the French food on the waxed floorboards.  Everything in that flat was small and delicate.  It harmonized with my godfather and his wife.  Not that he was delicate, but he was a little man who walked quietly and quickly on small feet, or stood at the fireplace with a cigarette between his fingers, neat and precise as a decent doctor ought to be.  And he had something of the pursed lips of medical men--the contraction of the lips that they somehow acquire leaning over wide-open bodies.  

Tom's wife was delicate.  In fact, she looked almost brittle.  She was French, and the daughter of a great Protestant patriarch with a long white beard who dominated French Calvinism from the Rue des Saints-Peres.

Everything in their flat was in proportion to their own stature and delicacy and precision and neatness and wit.  Yet I do not say it looked like a doctor's place--still less like an English doctor's place.  English doctors always seem to go in for very heavy and depressing kinds of furniture.  But Tom was not the kind of specialist that always wears a frock coat and wing collar.  His flat was bright and full of objects I was afraid to break and, on the whole, I was scared to walk too heavily for fear I might suddenly go through the floor.

I know how Merton feels.  My friends would never describe me as "delicate" or "neat."  I tend to be loud and a little irreverent most of the time.  A bull in a china shop, as my mother would say.  But it's not that I can't recognize and appreciate beautiful things.  One of the most memorable days of my life was when I wandered through the Met in New York, running into unexpected Rembrandts and Picassos and a room full of van Goghs.  It was as if I was breathing beauty. 

I've been thinking about that day a lot recently.  In the past week, we've seen humankind at its very worst (that knee on George Floyd's neck, Donald Trump's Bible photo op) and very best (African Americans marching for justice, real police officers joining that march).  It's so easy to give into despair at times like this.  Yet, so much of that day at the Met for me was about encountering the very best of what human beings have brought into the world.  Creations that made me cry because I was in their presence.

Creatures that birthed "Starry Night" and "Bridge Over a Pond of Water Lilies" can do better.  We don't have to accept institutional racism or a President of the United States who mobilizes the armed forces against American citizens.  We can stand up or kneel down or link arms and say "no" to all that is ugly and wrong in the universe.  In fact, we HAVE to do this, or else we forfeit the one thing that binds us all together:  our humanity.

Let me end by sharing a moment I had today.  When I got home from work, I noticed that the lilacs in my backyard were flowering.  It was a sultry afternoon, and I walked around my house to smell the purple blossoms.  As I neared the bushes, I could hear loud buzzing.  The lilacs were teeming with fat bumblebees who were obviously getting drunk on violet nectar.  I stood there for over 15 minutes, getting drunk with them.

It was better than the Met.  It was a reminder that beauty that still exists in the world, despite pandemics and racism and riots.  It was a van Gogh moment.  Monet moment.  Pollack and O'Keeffe moment.  I shared it with those bees, and it was a miracle.

For that, Saint Marty gives thanks.

A picture I took this afternoon

May 28: A Musical, Classic Saint Marty, "Lilacs"

Went to see a musical today with my wife and son.  Once Upon a Mattress.  It was a community theater production, and my son loved it.  I had to drag him away from his computer game to get him to go.  Half-way through the performance, he turned to me and whispered, "I regret not wanting to come."  Then he hugged my arm.

It was a great daddy moment for me, introducing my son to something that I love.  I may not be able to change a flat or change the oil in my car.  I don't fish or hunt or throw footballs.  But I can sit in a dark auditorium with my kids, tell them about Carol Burnett and Nathan Lane and Stephen Sondheim.

Three years ago, I was thinking about my differences again . . .

May 28, 2014:  Cars, Mechanically Challenged, Google

...Elwyn [E. B. White] loved cars.  So did the boys' father.  After selling two of his three carriage horses, Samuel bought a Pope-Tribune runabout, which looked sporty with its long, straight-steering shaft and boxy engine bonnet, until he replaced it with a sleek Maxwell roadster whose short running board swooped forward and back to form elegant tire guards like wings.  But Samuel never learned how to drive and left that particular twentieth-century excitement to his children.

White was in love with the horseless carriage, as were his brothers and father.  Typical guys.  They're interested in cars that are fast, elegant, sleek.  I'm sure that if Elwyn were a teenager in the twenty-first century, he'd probably own the newest iPhone.


I've never been into cars.  The only thing I look for in a car is that, when I turn the key in the ignition, it starts.  That is my definition of a good car.  Of course, I like driving new cars.  But I really don't care if I'm driving a station wagon or a Lexus.  If it gets me to where I want to go, I'm satisfied.

I've always been mechanically challenged.  All of my brothers know cars inside and out.  They can do crap like brake jobs and oil changes.  I'm happy if I can change a taillight (and I usually have to ask my brother to help me).  I just don't do car stuff.  However, I can spot a bad metaphor from a mile away.  Give me a bad poem and pencil, and I will turn it into a verbal Corvette.

That's who I am.  I'm not the oily jeans kind of guy.  Sometimes I wish I was.  I could probably save myself a lot of money.  This morning, I heard a story on the radio about Google creating a car that drives itself.  Just enter your destination, and the car does the rest.  If Google invents a vehicle that changes its own oil and fixes its own valves (whatever the hell those are), I am totally sold.

Until then, Saint Marty will continue to put his key in the ignition, say a prayer, and turn it.

If it gets me to work, I'll drive it.

And an early summer poem . .

Lilacs

by:  Martin Achatz



Early June, lilacs begin to bloom
In my backyard, along paths
I walk at sunrise.  They swell
The air with rain and dirt,
The promise of warm months
Just around the corner, a battalion
About to roll into town,
Unstoppable as a tank.
Bushes bud, slow fireworks
The color of midnight
Blueberry and silk cocoon.
By summer solstice,
Lilacs overrun my neighborhood,
The way the Mississippi overruns
Its banks during hurricanes,
The way fire and bricks and blood
Overran the streets of Los Angeles
After Rodney King.  For days,
The world smolders, burns
Purple and white, unchecked,
Until the killing heat of July
Comes, withers petals to husks
Of brown, to burned-out shells,
To reminders of that first
Crush of summer, when we all
Spill into the sun, sure,
If we shout loud enough,
Spread our lilacs far enough,
The children of America and Pakistan,
Of Israel, Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan
Will somehow blossom into peace.

June 4: The Future, Graduation Time, Change

[E. B. White] graduated from high school in January 1917 but didn't leave for Cornell until fall.  Whit a thousand dollars' worth of scholarships--ten times Cornell's annual tuition--he had no financial worries.  But the future did not look rosy...

E. B. White graduated from high school just before President Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany, throwing the United States into World War I.  Instead of going off to college, many young men went off to war.  On Palm Sunday that year, White looked out his window and "noticed that the neighborhood lawns were sporting so many flags they looked like red, white, and blue spring flowers."

It's that time of year.  Graduation is in the air along with the pollen.  This Friday, one of my niece's is graduating from high school.  Last month, another of my nieces graduated from college, and she's getting married in the fall.  Early June is a time of change.  The planet shifts from the dead branches of winter to the dandelion blossoms of spring.  Everybody is happy, celebrating the sun and warmth.

I've never been a lover of change.  This time of year sort of depresses me.  Young people are growing up, moving away, starting new lives.  Like E. B. White, I don't see the future as rosy.  I'd need to drink a lot of gin to attain that outlook. 

My future looked rosy when I graduated from high school and had a full-ride scholarship to college.  My future looked rosy when I graduated from college and had a full-ride assistantship to graduate school.  My future looked rosy when I earned my Master's degree and had a full-ride fellowship to a PhD program.  My future looked rosy when I received another full-ride fellowship to an MFA program.  And my future looked rosy when I marched into my MFA graduation ceremony.

Since then, things have not always been so rosy.  In fact, much of the last ten years has been a struggle.  Tonight, on the fourth of June, the lilacs are blooming.  The crickets are chirping.  My kids are done with school for the summer.  And I'm struggling again.  I'm sure I'll find my happy place again.  It's going to take a while.

In the meantime, Saint Marty will have to rely on sleeping pills and chocolate.

No matter how high you throw them, they always end up in the dirt

June 1: Lilacs, New Poem, Not Much Time

I realize, rereading my post from yesterday, I may have come across as a little callous or self-centered.  That was not my intent.  I really am trying to find the daisy in my pile of cow dung.  I'm serious about that.  SH is actually someone I care about a great deal.  She has just been very difficult for a very long time.

I don't have a lot of time to chitchat.  However, I do have a new poem today.  It was inspired by a walk I took at sunrise, before work.  The lilac bushes are coming into bloom, and, for me, that's a signal that summer has arrived.  For some reason, lilacs always fills me with hope for the future.  I associate the scent with high school graduations and accomplishment, with moving on to a bright future.  It's the optimistic side of myself I usually try to stifle.

This poem is political.  When I started to write it, I didn't intend to write a political poem.  It just happened.  I think it's pretty good.  You be the judge.

Saint Marty is taking time to smell the lilacs.

Lilacs

Early June, lilacs begin to bloom

In my backyard, along paths

I walk at sunrise.  They swell

The air with rain and dirt,

The promise of warm months

Just around the corner, a battalion

About to roll into town,

Unstoppable as a tank.

Bushes bud, slow fireworks

The color of midnight

Blueberry and silk cocoon.

By summer solstice,

Lilacs overrun my neighborhood,

The way the Mississippi overruns

Its banks during hurricanes,

The way fire and bricks and blood

Overran the streets of Los Angeles

After Rodney King.  For days,

The world smolders, burns

Purple and white, unchecked,

Until the killing heat of July

Comes, withers petals to husks

Of brown, to burned-out shells,

To reminders of that first

Crush of summer, when we all

Spill into the sun, sure,

If we shout loud enough,

Spread our lilacs far enough,

The children of America and Pakistan,
Of Israel, Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan

Will somehow blossom into peace.

Summer has arrived