March 4: Great Birds and Beasts, World Wildlife Day, "Portrait of the Virgin Mary as Skunk"

Santiago admires the birds and beasts . . . 

"If you're not tired, fish," he said aloud, "you must be very strange."

He felt very tired now and he knew the night would come soon and he tried to think of other things. He thought of the Big Leagues, to him they were the Gran Ligas, and he knew that the Yankees of New York were playing the Tigres of Detroit.

This is the second day now that I do not know the result of the juegos, he thought. But I must have confidence and I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel. What is a bone spur? he asked himself. Un espuela de hueso. We do not have them. Can it be as painful as the spur of a fighting cock in one's heel? I do not think I could endure that or the loss of the eye and of both eyes and continue to fight as the fighting cocks do. Man is not much beside the great birds and beasts. Still I would rather be that beast down there in the darkness of the sea.

Santiago must be very strange.  Or very normal.  He wants to be the fish down in the dark waters below him.  And roosters fighting each other blind.  Perhaps it has something to do with tenacity and the instinct to fight, despite being in pain and wounded.  That feral instinct that exists in all creatures.

Last night, I led a poetry workshop for World Wildlife Day, which is March 3.  For two hours, everyone got in touch with their spirit animals.  We wrote about mammoths and vaquitas and swans and wolves.  The hairy and feathered and scaled.  Extinct and near extinct.  

My stuff was alive on the page.  A fish fighting on a line.  A porpoise launching itself at the stars.  A black bear fleeing a pack of beagles.  The other writers captured similar creatures.  It was a veritable menagerie of verse.

I was exhausted when the workshop began, but I found energy in those animals.  They gave me second wind.  Life.  Writing often does that for me.  In fact, I think that the only time I'm really alive is when I have a pen in my hand.  It's when I am fully myself.

Right now, typing this post, I grow fur, sprout feathers, breathe fins.  This is me.  Wild.  Untamed.  Each syllable, a lion charging an antelope.  

Can you hear Saint Marty roaring?

A poem from last night . . . 

Portrait of the Virgin Mary as Skunk

by  Martin Achatz

She shambles, slow as a mud puddle,

bright arm of lightning splitting

the night of her body, peacock

plume tail sweeping the ground

behind her, the way, I imagine,

Mary swept sawdust from her floors

after Joseph was done for the day.

And think of that smell, part terror,

part warning.  Mary calling

her son to supper, him ignoring her,

turning stones into toads, leaves 

into salamanders.  When he didn't

answer, Mary unleashed her quiet

wrath until it settled on his godly

skin, pickled him in maternal love.

March 3: Dream About the Lions, Fell Asleep, 57 Degrees

Santiago wants to dream . . . 

I wish he'd sleep and I could sleep and dream about the lions, he thought. Why are the lions the main thing that is left? Don't think, old man, he said to himself. Rest gently now against the wood and think of nothing. He is working. Work as little as you can.

It was getting into the afternoon and the boat still moved slowly and steadily. But there was an added drag now from the easterly breeze and the old man rode gently with the small sea and the hurt of the cord across his back came to him easily and smoothly.

Once in the afternoon the line started to rise again. But the fish only continued to swim at a slightly higher level. The sun was on the old man's left arm and shoulder and on his back. So he knew the fish had turned east of north.

Now that he had seen him once, he could picture the fish swimming in the water with his purple pectoral fins set wide as wings and the great erect tail slicing through the dark. I wonder how much he sees at that depth, the old man thought. His eye is huge and a horse, with much less eye, can see in the dark. Once I could see quite well in the dark. Not in the absolute dark. But almost as a cat sees.

The sun and his steady movement of his fingers had uncramped his left hand now completely and he began to shift more of the strain to it and he shrugged the muscles of his back to shift the hurt of the cord a little.

Sometimes, falling asleep is a great escape from difficult circumstances.  Santiago knows he needs to rest and prepare for the coming battle with the fish.  Plus, the old man wants to be with the lions in his dreams.  The problem with dreams, especially really good ones, is that, when you wake up, there are those few moments of leftover euphoria followed by intense disappointment.

I fell asleep on my couch last night, and I had a dream.  A really good one.  I rarely remember my dreams, good or bad.  Upon waking, they hang in the air around me and then quickly evaporate into vague untethered emotions.  I don't keep dream journals.  I should, but the idea of sitting in my bed in the middle of the night, scribbling in my journal, is not attractive.  I don't think I'd ever get back to sleep.

When I woke on the couch from my good dream, I shuffled into my bedroom, crawled under the covers, and prepared to sleep again.  Then, I realized how cold it was in the house.  I lay there, waiting to hear the heat kick on.  I waited for five minutes.  Nothing.

So, I crawled out from under the covers, stumbled back into the living room to check the thermostat.  It was set at 70 degrees, and the temperature in the house was 65.  I cursed a little and dialed the temperature up a little more.  I got a "low battery" warning on the thermostat.  I scrounged up a couple AA batteries and put them in the thermostat.  I waited for the furnace to grind to life.  Nothing.

Long story short (too late for that), I spent almost three hours trying to get a furnace person to come out and get our heat going, watching the temperature in the house slowly plummet with each phone call I made.  All of the businesses that advertised 24-hour service weren't answering or had answering services that promised return phones calls within minutes.  Those callbacks never materialized.

Finally, over two hours into this adventure, at about 3 a.m. and 57 degrees, Charlie from Trudell Plumbing and Heating called me.  He sounded tired, asked a few questions, and then said he was on his way.  An hour later, he was in our little furnace crawlspace, tinkering, checking, mumbling to himself.  Twenty minutes after he arrived, our furnace roared back to life, like one of Santiago's dream lions.  Charlie was kind, helpful, and didn't tell me I needed to replace my furnace.

I went back to bed, got about an hour-and-a-half of sleep, and then hit the ground running.  Work and work.  Lunch with one of my best friends I haven't really seen since the beginning of the pandemic.  More work.  Bubble tea with my daughter and her boyfriend.  More work.  A beer with another wonderful friend.  Then, in the evening. I led a poetry workshop.

I am, to say the least, a little spent.  But, as I sit typing this post, my furnace is purring out heat, and I have a three-day weekend ahead.

Saint Marty couldn't dream of a better start to his mini vacation.

March 2: Strange Old Man, Weirdos, Penis-Shaped Rockets

Santiago knows that he is a weirdo . . . 

"I told the boy I was a strange old man," he said. "Now is when I must prove it."

The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.

I have been strange my whole life.  I've never really had to prove this fact.  I'm a poet and actor and musician and blogger and podcaster and theater director.  That's not even half of my weirdo credentials.  I love books about talking bears and ghosts.  I sometimes cry when I read poetry.  My entire way of interacting and understanding the universe is filtered through words.  If I don't write about something, it simply didn't happen.

My kids know I'm weird.  They see me sitting on the couch every night, tapping away at my laptop or scribbling in my journal.  I've gone into my daughter's grade school classrooms and made her classmates squish bananas between their fingers and then write about it.  I've made my son's classmates write about Bigfoot.

There is nothing wrong with weird.  Being weird is simply a natural adaptation to the current state of the world.  I would say that, if you are not weird in some way, there's something severely wrong with you.  Vladimir Putin is invading Ukraine, threatening an entire population with military genocide.  That's majorly fucked up.  If your reaction to this fact is simply to pour yourself a cup of tea, watch a rerun of The Golden Girls, and go about your normal day-to-day routine, then you are insane or a Trump supporter.

Weird means that you care about the plight of the vaquita porpoise (there's only ten left in the entire world).  Weird means that you would willingly travel to California and sit in sulfur baths naked to meet your favorite poet.  Weird means that you believe building a rocket launch pad on the shores of Lake Superior is an inherently bad idea.

If you care about any of those statements in the previous paragraph, you are weird.  Fly your freak flag proudly.  Because it's the weirdos who are going to save the world.  Not billionaires who send themselves into orbit in penis-shaped rockets.  Or cozy up to Russian dictators in order to be elected President of the United States.  Weirdos know good weird and bad weird.

Saint Marty is proud to be the patron saint of weirdos. 

March 1: His Greatness and His Glory, Wonder, King Kong

Santiago makes a vow to kill something greater and more glorious than himself . . . 

"I had better re-bait that little line out over the stern," he said. "If the fish decides to stay another night I will need to eat again and the water is low in the bottle. I don't think I can get anything but a dolphin here. But if I eat him fresh enough he won't be bad. I wish a flying fish would come on board tonight. But I have no light to attract them. A flying fish is excellent to eat raw and I would not have to cut him up. I must save all my strength now. Christ, I did not know he was so big."

"I'll kill him though," he said. "In all his greatness and his glory."

Although it is unjust, he thought. But I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures.

I think human beings have a kind of innate urge to kill or eliminate wonder.  That's what Santiago is talking about doing in this passage.  He admires the great fish.  Knows that what he is about to do is, perhaps, wrong.  Like erasing a charcoal study by Leonardo da Vinci.  

Think of all the things that used to exist that no longer exist because of humankind.  The dodo.  Atlas bear.  Laughing owl.  Caribbean monk seal.  Caspian tiger.  Western black rhinoceros.  Golden toad.  I'm not even going to get into all the places on this planet that we have maimed  and mined and mutilated.  Close to 30 years ago, I visited Hanauma Bay in Hawaii.  It was beautiful, but, even then, the coral was bleaching white because of tourism and climate change.

Humans cannot simply admire and appreciate.  They must exploit and monetize the wonders of the world.  One of my favorite movies as a kid was King Kong.  The old one, with Fay Wray, although I got into the whole striptease Jessica Lange did with Kong in the 1976 remake.  That movie, for me, sort of encapsulates what is wrong with human beings.  Rather than simply being stunned and awed by Kong, Carl Denham has to capture and drag him to New York City, where he turns Kong into a Broadway sideshow attraction.  

There it is:  a human being putting a price tag on something wondrous and, in the process, destroying it.  It's a pretty good metaphor for our world today.  

I'm a poet.  I will never make a whole lot of money as a poet, unless something miraculous happens like Joe Biden choosing me as the poet at his next inauguration.  Or I win a Pulitzer or Nobel Prize.  Other than that, nobody is looking to put a price tag on what I do.  

But here's the thing:  poetry itself is the wonder business.  The best poems, the ones that leave me breathless and changed in some way, are all about capturing (in words) that feeling of seeing Kong for the first time.  Fearful.  Frightened.  Awestruck.  Dumbstruck.  Money does not even come into the poetic equation.  I can count on two hands the number of times I have received monetary compensation for being a poet.  Most poets are thrilled with a good brownie and a nice glass of wine as payment. 

I try to believe that humans can do better.  Be better.  Yet, wars are fought over oil.  Climate change continues practically unabated.  Every hour, three species disappear from the planet.  If you do the math, that's between 18,000 and 55,000 species vanishing a year.  All because humans prefer dollars over poems.

I have been writing poems about Bigfoot for close to five or six years now.  Because Bigfoot represents, to me, everything that is wondrous and mysterious in the world.  Bigfoot is my Kong.  If everyone had some kind of Bigfoot in their lives--something miraculous and indescribable--the world would be in much better shape.

If you have a Bigfoot or Kong, Saint Marty hopes you write a poem or song about it.  Or paint its picture.  Preserve the wonder in wonderful.