May 2: Long Day and Evening, Melissa Broder, "Hope This Helps"

It has been a long day of waiting for news about my brother's health.  I now have that news.

It will be a long evening of grading papers and final exams.  Red ink on my fingers.

Saint Marty needs some help tonight.  Maybe some cookies and milk.

Hope This Helps

by:  Melissa Broder

We need a loving grown-up to give us advice
and that loving grown-up is the universe.
Who wants to go to the universe for help?
You can’t touch the universeor kiss its mouth
or stick your fingers in its mouth
though sometimes the universe works horizontally through people
and I like that.
My friend channeled the universe
when he said I was milk.
My friend said I was born milk
but then grown-ups poured in lemon juice
which makes sense
because I’ve always felt like rotten cottage cheese
and I’ve been running around the planet
like I don’t want to be this
when in fact I am milk
and was always milk
and will always be milk.
I don’t think this is a story about blaming grown-ups
for the ways we are ruined.
I think this is a story about knowing what we are up against
mostly ourselves
and what our essential consistency is
which in my case is milk
and in your case is milk
you are milk you are
milk you are
so milk.

May 2: Gurgled and Cooed, Little Maudlin, My Brother

An unseen hand turned a master valve.  Out of the showerheads gushed scalding rain.  The rain was a blowtorch that did not warm.  It jazzed and jangled Billy's skin without thawing the ice in the marrow of his long bones.

The Americans' clothes were meanwhile passing through poison gas.  Body lice and bacteria and fleas were dying by the billions.  So it goes.

And Billy zoomed back in time to his infancy.  He was a baby who had just been bathed by his mother.  Now his mother wrapped him in a towel, carried him into a rosy room that was filled with sunshine.  She unwrapped him, laid him on the tickling towel, powdered him between his legs, joked with him, patted his little jelly belly.  Her palm on his little jelly belly made potching sounds.

Billy gurgled and cooed.

A movement in time, Billy transported from a moment of naked vulnerability as an adult to a moment of naked vulnerability as a baby.  Billy is not in charge of himself.  The decision of whether he lives or dies, is happy or sad, rests in the hands of higher powers.  His German captors.  His mother.  God.  Billy is just along for the ride.

I'm going to be a little maudlin this afternoon.  This passage about birth and life and death comes on a day where my brother is in the hospital.  Last night, he was taken to the ER where he was diagnosed with sepsis.  Sometime--either before he got to the hospital or while he was there, I'm not sure--he suffered a heart attack.  This is his second heart attack.  So, they put my brother in an ambulance and brought him to the hospital here in Marquette, Michigan, where there are cardiologists on staff.  That was last night.

All day long today, I have been waiting for news about my brother's condition.  My sister just called me.  The cardiologist performed a heart catheterization on my brother.  He has lost another 27% of his heart tissue, and the cardiologist told him that he will have to go on permanent disability.  His heart won't take the strain of daily work.

This news was difficult for me to hear.  My brother is a big man--the tallest in the family--and strong.  He was always the muscle in my family's plumbing business, hauling water heaters and furnaces out of basements, digging up sewer lines, soldering pipes in crawlspaces.  He's larger than life.

Now, he's going to be greatly diminished.  Probably unable to do things that most of us take for granted, like climbing stairs or rearranging furniture or carrying groceries.  On top of that, I would imagine the length of his life will be shortened by this event, as well.  His heart is severely damaged.

So, forgive me if I have no wisdom today.  This is one of those times where I truly am at a loss.  I feel like Billy in the passage above, powerless and vulnerable.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for his brother's life.

May 1: Poet of the Week, Melissa Broder, "Our Father, Who Art in Heaven"

I'm going to do something a little different. 

Melissa Broder is the Poet of the Week.  She is a great poet.  Won a Pushcart Prize recently.  However, I am going to be including her Twitter poems, because she is just so freakin' funny and smart.

So, Saint Marty presents a tweet from Melissa Broder:

our father, who art in heaven, please make him still think about me sometimes in a romantic, tortured, aching and regretful way

May 1: Whaterever was Coming, Professor Hannibal Lecter, Grace

One of the best bodies belonged to the oldest American by far, a high school teacher from Indianapolis.  His name was Edgar Derby.  He hadn't been in Billy's boxcar.  He'd been in Roland Weary's car, had cradled Weary's head while he died.  So it goes.  Derby was forty-four years old.  He was so old he had a son who was a marine in the Pacific theater of war.

Derby had pulled political wires to get into the army at his age.  The subject he had taught in Indianapolis was Contemporary Problems in Western Civilization.  He also coached the tennis team, and took very good care of his body.

Derby's son would survive the war.  Derby wouldn't.  That good body of his would be filled with holes by a firing squad in Dresden in sixty-eight days.  So it goes.

The worst American body wasn't Billy's.  The worst body belonged to a car thief from Cicero, Illinois.  His name was Paul Lazzaro.  He was tiny, and not only were his bones and teeth rotten, but his skin was disgusting.  Lazzaro was polka-dotted all over with dime-sized scars.  He had had many plagues of boils.

Lazzaro, too, had been on Roland Weary's boxcar, and had given his word of honor to Weary that he would find some way to make Billy Pilgrim pay for Weary's death.  He was looking around now, wondering which naked human being was Billy.

The naked Americans took their places under many showerheads along a white-tiled wall.  There were no faucets they could control.  They could only wait for whatever was coming.  Their penises were shriveled and their balls were retracted.  Reproduction was not the main business of the evening.

Again, this scene could come from newsreel footage of the Holocaust.  All these naked prisoners of war lined up in a shower room, awaiting their fates.  They may be lucky and survive, or they may be unlucky and gassed.  Of course, Billy survives.  We already know this.  Billy survives the prison camp, the firebombing of Dresden, an airplane crash later in life.  He is not killed by his German captors.  Or Edgar Derby.  Or Paul Lazzaro.  Billy's luck holds out.

As I reread Slaughterhouse, I'm struck by how lucky Billy really is.  He is witness to a string of different tragedies, yet he is never mortally harmed.  That's pretty damn good luck, if you believe in that sort of thing.  Others would call it fate.  Christians might call it grace.

I am sitting in my office at the university right now.  It is Monday, and I have one final night class to teach for this semester.  I am not feeling lucky or fated or graced.  I'm exhausted from a weekend of grading.  Even worse, I left a red pen in my shirt pocket this morning.  The pen cap came off, and now I look like a serial killer or a butcher.  Both of my shirts are soaked with pools of red ink.  My hands are stained, too.  It doesn't look like I was grading essays.  It looks like I was slaughtering them.

My wife is supposed to bring me a change of shirt in a little while so that I don't frighten my students tonight.  Imagine it:  me walking into the room, Professor Hannibal Lecter.  I sit at my desk, smile, and say, "Hello, Clarice."  It would be pretty epic, but my students haven't done their class evaluations yet.  I want a job in the fall.

I'm not sure that I believe in luck.  Luck sort of hints at a random universe, where bad and good things happen for no apparent reason.  As a Christian, I fall in the grace camp.  God at work in my life.  That's comforting.  Sort of like Billy knowing that he's not going to die in that shower room, I know that God's looking out for me.  If something bad happens, I will be alright.  If something good happens, I will be alright.

Now, the red pen exploding in my pocket--that was just stupidity on my part.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for clean shirts and pants.