The fall semester began last Monday, so I find myself being pulled in many directions at once—from library events to lesson plans to revisions on my new manuscript to my ongoing war with insomnia. Now, on this Sunday night of Labor Day weekend, I dream of not working.
Sharon Olds writes about not working . . .
The Pediatrician Retires
by: Sharon Olds
This is the archway where I stood, next to the
panel of frosted glass, when they told me
there was a chance it could be epilepsy, and
almost before my heart sank
I felt a new-made layer of something fold
over my will and wrap it, in an instant,
as if the body takes care of the parent
who takes care of the child. This is the door
we came through each week while the symptoms slowly
faded. That is the fruit-scale where she had
weighed him, and his arms had flown to the sides
in an infant Moro. And there are the chairs
where one sits with the infectious ones,
the three-year-olds calmly struggling for air, not
listless or scared, steady workers,
pulling breath through the constricted passage,
Yes, she says, it’s the bronchial pneumonia
and asthma, the same as last month, the parent’s
heart suddenly stronger, like a muscle
the weight-lifter has worked. There is the room
where she took his blood and he watched the vial fill, he went
greener, and greener, and fainted, and she said,
Next time don’t be brave, next time
shout! And here is the chair where I sat and she
said If the nerve is dead, he will lose only
partial use of the hand, and it’s
the left hand—he’s right-handed, isn’t he?,
the girding, the triple binding of the heart.
This is the room where I sat, worried,
and opened the magazine, and saw
the war in Asia, a very young soldier
hanged by the neck—still a boy, almost,
not much older than the oldest children
in the waiting room. Suddenly its walls seemed
not quite real, as if we all
were in some large place together.
This is where I learned what I know,
the body university—
at graduation, we would cry, and throw
our ceiling-at-four-a.m. hats high in the air,
but I think that until the end of our life we are here.
It’s an interesting poem about parenting a child—all the duties and worries that come with the territory. I remember those first months as a new father—sneaking into the nursery to make sure that our infant daughter was still breathing, placing my hand on my infant son’s chest to feel his heartbeat. As Olds says, “until the end of our life we are here.” It doesn’t matter whether a child is one or twenty or fifty, that child will always be the tiny bundle of gas and joy from the hospital delivery room. My daughter lives six hours away now, is studying to be a doctor, but I still worry whether she has enough to eat. There’s no retiring from parenthood.
For the longest time in my life, I was known as “the plumber’s son.”. My dad was a well-known member of the community. Everybody knew him. There’s very few houses in my hometown that he didn’t fix a toilet in. Or cable a sewer. Or install a water heater. Even when he decided to retire, Dad still made service calls to friend’s houses. I think that’s why he lived such a long life—he never slowed down. Plus, he loved what he did.
I suppose that’s the key: loving what you do. I love my wife. I love my kids. And I love writing poetry. (I should throw “I love God” in there, too, since I’m a church organist.) You don’t retire from love.
My love of poetry has been my week-long obsession. The prompt from The Daily Poet on August 28 was this:
Close your eyes and imagine a poet (living or dead). Think about everything you know about this poet. Imagine him or her sitting down with you on a comfortable sofa. Now, as the poet to dictate a poem to you and write down everything s/he says.
Last Monday, I started watching a three-part PBS documentary on the life of Dante Alighieri. It followed the great poet from birth to exile to composition of The Divine Comedy to death. Since that time, I’ve viewed that documentary (all six hours of it) about four or five times. And I reread Inferno and portions of Purgatorio. I’d forgotten how much I loved Dante.
You see, I studied Dante for an entire semester. My professor was a brilliant scholar from the Medieval Institute in Kalamazoo. To this day, when I think of the character of Virgil in The Divine Comedy, I always picture this man’s face. He loved teaching Dante, and he made me love reading Dante.
So, all of these elements from my life sort of coalesced into the idea of a poem in which I encounter the poet Dante. Of course, everyone knows that Dante’s muse was his long lost love, Beatrice. I decided to write my poem in terza rima, the form invented by Dante for his epic. Basically, terza rima consists of three-line stanzas (tercets) with a linked rhyme scheme (aba bcb cdc ded, etc.) Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso all end with a single line and the word “stars.”
I tried to follow Dante’s lead. For about four or five days, I’ve been writing and rewriting my poem, using terza rima and trying to stick the landing with the word “stars.” I think I finally nailed it, but you will have to be the judge of that.
I’ve driven myself crazy writing this poem. It’s all I’ve thought about for days. And I’ve loved every minute of it, which proves my point. (Yes, I do have a point.) Love/passion isn’t something from which you retire. I could no more retire from writing poetry than I could retire from being a father or husband. It’s just who I am.
So, to end August, Saint Marty presents his little Dante-esque tidbit . . .
Dante Shares Nachos with Me
by: Martin Achatz
He craved chips with lots of cheese,
enough cheese to sate
all the bloated bellies
in that glutton circle, while I ate
a bowl of Cheerios
sprinkled with raisins. The great
poet, sulfur-seeped, lovesick, rose,
paced to the kitchen, fetched
bottles of beer from the fridge, crows
scratching the world outside with wretched
caws, as if they knew
the syllables of the name etched
on his savaged soul, drew
each letter with their inky
beaks on the sky’s blue
chalkboard: B-E-A-T-R-I-C-E.
I tried to distract him,
avoid yet another melancholy
feast that ended in drunken hymn
after drunken hymn about
unquenched tongues, unkissed skin,
but his heart was stubborn, devout
in its infernal pining
that no Cheeto or hotdog with kraut
could dim. So he sat beside me, whining
about all the scars
his crush’s spurn left shining
on his heaped plate like pepper jack stars.
