August 16, 2026: “The Last Time,” Mortality, “Card Trick”

Most young people don’t think about death a whole lot.  They’re too busy worrying about popsicles and grades and crushes and friends.  I even see this attitude in my college students.  Their whole focus is the future, what they’re going to be when they grow up.  It’s my job somehow to prepare them for the “real world.”  The problem is that they think they’re going to live forever and have plenty of time to deal with all of life’s brokenness and need.  

Marie Howe receives a lesson in mortality . . . 

The Last Time

by: Marie Howe

The last time we had dinner together in a restaurant 

with white tablecloths, he leaned forward

and took my two hands in his and said,

I’m going to die soon.  I want you to know that.

And I said, I think I do know.

And he said What surprises me is that you don’t.

And I said I do.  And he said, What?

And I said, Know that you’re going to die.

And he said, No, I mean know that you are.

Only people facing impending death really get it.  Whether they’re ten or 75 years old, they understand how brief our time on this planet is, and they also understand how meaningless most of life’s distractions are.  Think about it.  When you’re breathing your last breath, are you going to give a shit whether you own a Lamborghini or a ‘75 Dodge Dart?  And, if you’re lucky enough to reach old age, will it matter if you live in a condo in Boca Raton or an assisted living facility?  Mortality has a way of boiling down life to its essentials:  are you loved?  are you happy?  are you at peace?

In the end, love and happiness and peace are what it’s all about.  A person can be loved by a dachshund in a secluded cabin, and a person can be loved by three generations of family living in a Brooklyn townhouse.  A person can be happy living in a Spanish villa with a billion-dollar bank account, and a person can also be happy living in a studio apartment while working a minimum-wage job.  Finally, a person can find peace watching a Lake Superior sunset, and a person can find peace at a Kendrick Lamar concert at Ford Field in Detroit.

Love.  Happiness.  Peace.  That’s all that really matters.

It’s Sunday night.  My puppy is sleeping on the floor next to me.  An episode of Portrait Artist of the Year is on the TV.  My wife made a delicious dinner of meatballs and gravy.  In a little while, I’m going to be leading a virtual poetry workshop from my home office.  This is definition of a perfect evening for me.  I feel blessed because I’m surrounded by love in a safe space.  And I’m sort of dreading leaving this safe space tomorrow morning to go to work, where love and happiness and peace are much more difficult (if not impossible) to find.

After last night’s post, I think most of you understand my anxiety about reentering the “real” world.  Most weekends, I try to curate an environment where love, happiness, and peace exist freely because the rest of my life is so chaotic and pressured.  I’ve especially embraced this cocoon of serenity this weekend, and the idea of breaking out of it tomorrow is . . . well . . . almost painful.

Many friends and family members have reached out to me with messages of love and support in the 24 hours since I posted yesterday.  That has lifted my spirits so much (and made me cry on a few occasions).  The reading in church today was about the Gentile woman begging Christ to cure her daughter of demonic possession.  Jesus says to the woman, “It isn’t right to take food from the children and throw it to the dogs.”  And the woman responds that even dogs eat the crumbs from their master’s table.  Jesus heals the woman’s daughter because “. . . your faith is great.”

I have faith that I’ll make it through this blue period because I’ve done it before.  Lots of people think the antonym of faith is doubt.  It isn’t.  It’s fear.  Now, I’m not that brave of a person.  I’m afraid of a lot of things.  Rodents.  Heights.  Bad poetry.  Green bean casserole.  The trick is not to let fear rule your life.

I will wake up tomorrow morning, get dressed, and go to work, despite my anxieties.  Or maybe because of my anxieties.  I don’t know.  If I just called in sick and curled up on the couch tomorrow, fear wins.  Anxiety wins.  Sadness wins.  Plus, I might never leave my house again.  So, to paraphrase the advice of a therapist friend, I’m going to fake it ‘til I make it.  

I will have love and happiness and peace in my life again.  Eventually.

Saint Marty wrote this poem today.  It’s about conquering fear . . . 

Card Trick

by: Martin Achatz

My dog doesn’t like lightning, scoots

into the dark bathroom at the first pang

and rumble of electricity in the sky.  There

she stays, curled tight as a fist on the bath mat

while the clouds are stitched with jagged

flame.  I don’t bother her as she cowers

in there, leave her to find some sense

of safety to uncoil the springs of her body.

Sometimes, though, I go and sit next

to her, put my hand on her heaving flanks,

leave it there until she relaxes, looks up at me

as if I’ve just shuffled the deck of her fur,

turned the lightning into the ace of hearts.

August 15, 2026: “How Some of It Happened,” Confession, “hebron”

In case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t been posting a lot this summer.  And I’ve made tons of excuses about WHY I haven’t been posting:  taking some “me” time, working hard at the library, focusing on my latest poetry manuscript, reading War and Peace.  You get the idea.  

Here’s my confession:  I haven’t experienced a whole lot of happiness this summer.  Yes, I am so proud of my son for graduating in May and for landing a job at the local children’s museum.  Yes, my daughter continues to amaze me with her drive and courage in her medical school program.  And my wife is the most loving, supportive partner, even when I’m not easy to be around.

Yet, in these long days of summer, I’ve been really struggling.

Marie Howe writes about her brother’s struggles . . . 

How Some of It Happened

by: Marie Howe

My brother was afraid, all his life, of going blind, so deeply

that he would turn the dinner knives away from, looking at him,

he said, as they lay on the kitchen table.

He would throw a sweatshirt over those knobs that lock the car door

from the inside, and once, he dismantled a chandelier in the middle

of the night when everyone was sleeping.

We found the pile of sharp and shining crystals in the upstairs hall.

So you understand, it was terrible

when they clamped his one eye open and put the needle in his cheek

and up and into his eye from underneath

and held it there for a full minute before they drew it slowly out

once a week for many weeks.  He learned to lean into it,

to settle down he said, and still the eye went dead, ulcerated,

breaking up green in his head as the other eye, still blue

and wide open, looked and looked at the clock.

My brother promised me he wouldn’t die after our father died.

He shook my hand on a train going home one Christmas and gave me

five years, as clearly as he promised he’d be home for breakfast when

I watched him walk into the New York City autumn night.  By nine, I promise,

and he did come back.  And five years later he gave me five years more.

So much for the brave pride of premonition, 

the worry that won’t let it happen.

You know, he said, I always knew I would die young.

And then I got sober, and I thought, OK, I’m not.

I’m going to see thirty and live to be an old man.  And now

it turns out that I am going to die.  Isn’t that funny?

—One day it happens:  what you have feared all your life,

the unendurable specific, the exact thing.  No matter what you say or do.

This is what my brother said:  Here, sit closer to the bed

so I can see you.

Howe’s brother experiences what he feared the most:  blindness.  Yet, he learns to lean into it, settle down.  It seems that the certainty of his impending death removes his childhood terror of living in darkness.  One struggle replaces the other, and her brother finds a kind of peace, even as he still tries to shield Howe from pain.  The last two lines of the poem absolutely gut me—the brother’s small act of need and comfort:  “. . .  sit closer to the bed / so I can see you.”  Be near me, he’s saying, and I love you.

My struggles pale in comparison to the subject matter of Howe’s poem.  In fact, I’m almost embarrassed to write about my mental health struggles.  Yet, here I sit in metaphorical darkness, asking you, kind reader, to be near me.

That’s been the hardest part of these last couple months—the loneliness.  When you’re sitting on your living room couch in the middle of the night, crying for no tangible reason, you start feeling like you’re stranded on some alien planet with no way to get home.  (So, either I’m E.T. the extraterrestrial trying to phone home, or I’m Matt Damon in The Martian, trying to grow potatoes to survive until the rescue team shows up.)

I’ve been trying to pinpoint the cause of my current melancholia.  I am now the father of two adult children who no longer depend on me for sage advice or help with homework.  I realized this week that I’ve already lived over half my life and have only 30 or 35 years left.  If I’m lucky.  (Like Howe’s brother, I’ve always thought I was going to die young.)  And, looking back on my life, I’m not sure how much of a difference I’ve made in this world.  I haven’t saved anyone from a burning building or donated a kidney.  As far as I know, my writing hasn’t altered the universe in any way, either.

In short, my life hasn’t really mattered all that much.  (Yes, as I typed those words, I started crying.  Again.)

This weekend, in particular, has been very difficult for many reasons.  The only moment I found a scrap of happiness came this afternoon when I finished a poem I’ve been trying to write for over a week.  I read it to my wife, and she smiled and nodded at me (after making me change one image—she is my best and harshest critic).  For a little while, I actually felt lighter, as if some weight had lifted off my shoulders.  I held onto that feeling for as long as I could before the darkness descended again.

That’s my confession.  This whole summer has been my penance.

Here’s the poem Saint Marty finished today . . . 

hebron

by: Martin Achatz

standing at the mouth of the cave as a tornado

screamed by, elijah thought it was god

blowing out birthday candles.  but it wasn’t.  then

the ground shook its fist, the mountain stomped

its feet, and elijah was sure it was god line dancing

with moses, but it wasn’t.  then a firestorm baked

everything to bricks and pottery, and elijah thought

it was god having a smoke after dinner, but it wasn’t.

then a mosquito flew into his ear, sang him 

a lullaby, and elijah thought it was his mother,

but it wasn’t.  it was god eating ripe blueberries

and humming “what a wonderful world”

before it had even been written.

August 8, 2026: “A Certain Light,” Bravery, “Hero Worship”

Right now, two of the most popular movies in the world are Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day.  An ancient superhero and a modern superhero.  The human race has always looked for people to admire and venerate for acts of self-sacrifice and bravery.  (Now, in an era of unchecked greed, political chaos, artificial “intelligence,” and environmental crisis, heroes are an endangered species.)

Marie Howe writes about a her dying brother . . . 

A Certain Light

by: Marie Howe

He had taken the right pills the night before.

We had counted them out

from the egg carton where they were numbered so there’d be no mistake.

He had taken the morphine and the prednisone and the amitriptyline

and Florinef and Vancomycin and Haleion too quickly

and had thrown up in the bowl Joe had brought to the bed—a thin string

of blue spit—then waited a few minutes to calm himself, 

before he took them all again.  And had slept through the night

and the morning and was still sleeping at noon—or not sleeping.

He was breathing maybe twice a minute, and we couldn’t wake him,

we couldn’t wake him until we shook him hard calling, John wake up now

John wake up—Who is the president?

And he couldn’t answer.

His doctor told us we’d have to keep him up for hours.

He was all bones and skin, no tissue to absorb the medicine.

He couldn’t walk unless tow people held him.

And we made him talk about the movie:  What was the best moment in

On the Waterfront?  What was the music in Gone with the Wind?

And for seven hours he answered, if only to please us, mumbling

I like the morphine, sinking, rising, sleeping, rousing,

then only pain again—but wakened.

So wakened that late that night in one of those still blue moments

that were a kind of paradise, he finally opened his eyes wide,

and the room filled with a certain light we thought we’d never see again.

Look at you two, he said.  And we did.

And Joe said, Look at you.

And John said, How do I look?

And Joe said, Handsome.

What a gorgeous, heartbreaking moment of bravery.  Howe’s brother John is dying, yet, in one of his brief moments of lucidity, he attempts to comfort the two loves of his life as they process their loss.  In turn, John’s partner, Joe, in another moment of heartbreaking bravery, tries to comfort John, calling him “handsome” for (probably) the last time.  

Anyone who has held vigil at a dying loved one’s bedside has witnessed bravery.  Not the defeating-a-cyclops-or-the-Green-Goblin kind of bravery.  My sister, Sally, suffered greatly in her last months.  Near the end, the lymphoma stole her speech and motor functions, pressing against her brain, causing a major stroke.  She didn’t choose her fate.  Yet, she didn’t rage, rage against the dying of the light.  She fought as hard as she could for as long as she could, and then, when her frail body had no more fight left in it, she slipped away, surrounded by everyone who loved her.  Bravely.  Quietly.

There are heroes all around us.  Single mothers raising their kids on minimum wage salaries.  Doctors caring for pregnant women in defiance of draconian laws.  Trans people being their authentic selves each and every day.  Fathers teaching their sons to be gentle, loving people.  Teachers buying classroom supplies with their own money.  I could go on, but you get the idea.

You don’t need special powers to be a hero.  Just because you can’t fly doesn’t mean you also can’t raise a grieving person’s spirits.  Just because you don’t have superhuman strength doesn’t mean you also can’t lift a shade and fill a dark room with light.  Just because you don’t have x-ray vision doesn’t mean you also can’t look into a people’s eyes and see their pain.

You see, being a hero isn’t all that hard.  It’s just a matter of making the right choices.  Put down that cell phone and talk to your partner or kids at dinner.  Bring some groceries to a food pantry.  Shovel the sidewalk for an elderly neighbor.  Or, even easier, ask a friend, “How are you?” and really mean it; listen to them.  In short, be kind, attentive, and generous.  That’s all it takes.

My heroes today:  my son, working the second day at his new job; my daughter, living five hours away and working her ass off to become a doctor; and my wife, putting up with my shit (metaphorically and/or literally) every day of our marriage.

Saint Marty wrote a poem about heroes for tonight . . . 

Hero Worship

by: Martin Achatz

Loading my car for a trip to the laundromat,

I heard her before I saw her beating

her dark wings and white breast against

the narrow windows of the garage, gray

rectangles of sky calling her like the sirens

called Odysseus.  I’m no birder,  She could

have been a nuthatch or finch or junco.  

But in her frantic attempts to escape,

I found something heroic, as if she was

some poor nymph, transformed by Athena

to avoid Apollo’s lustful claws.  

I opened the garage door wide, flapped

an old towel in the air, tried herding her

toward open air.  She circled the rafters

once, twice, dove at my head, then,

as if her feathers suddenly felt the pull

of wind, swooped out of the garage

into the belly of clouds so fast even

Homer would have been left speechless.

August 6, 2026: “Just Now,” Quiet Evening, “The Best Day of My Life”

It’s been a quiet, lovely evening.  I didn’t go for a ten-mile hike.  Or eat prime rib for dinner.  Or see a cascade of meteors in the night sky.  Or read a long Russian novel in which a barefoot peasant throws herself in front of a train.  In short, nothing extraordinary happened.

Marie Howe writes about a quiet, lovely day . . . 

Just Now

by: Marie Howe

John opens his eyes when he hears the door click

open downstairs and Joe’s steps walking up past the meowing cat,

and the second click of the upstairs door, and then he lifts

his face so that Joe can kiss him.  Joe has brought armfuls

of broken magnolia branches in full blossom, and he putters

in the kitchen looking for a big jar to put them in and finds it.

And now they tower in the living room, white and sweet, where

John can see them if he leans out from his bed which

he can’t do just now, and now Joe is cleaning.  What a mess

you’ve left me, he says, and John is smiling, almost asleep again.

Such a tender, quiet poem, full of domestic perfection.  The love invested in these tiny moments Howe describes is undeniable and heartbreaking.  John is dying, and Joe, his partner, brings him magnolias to fill his life with beauty.  It would be perfect, if not for the looming phantom of mortality in the room.

But maybe it’s the specter of death that makes Howe’s poem so moving in its gentleness.  Some of the greatest, most profound moments of human connection I’ve ever experienced in my life have occurred at funerals and memorial services.  Everyone is just more vulnerable and open at such occasions.  People hug more, say “I love you” more.  Death reminds us all how tenuous and fragile life truly is.

That’s what I want to say tonight.  And I want to thank you, faithful disciple, for reading this post.  You are part of my perfect, quiet evening, and I wish you the same—perfection and quiet.

Saint Marty wrote a poem for tonight about a good day . . . 

The Best Day of My Life

by: Martin Achatz

Maybe it was today, and I just didn’t pay 

attention.  Maybe the mac and cheese I ate

for dinner was the best meal I will ever

eat, and that walk around the block

with my dog will be the best walk

of her life and, as she squatted 

on my neighbor’s lawn, she took

the best shit of her life.  Maybe

every breath I inhaled, every pulse

of my heart, every sip of cold water—

all the best.  And this poem.  Maybe

this poem I’m writing right now will be

the best poem I’ll ever write, and it will

be anthologized for years after I’m gone.

Maybe I should celebrate.  Maybe 

there’s a piece of the best leftover pizza

in my life still wrapped in aluminum foil,

sitting on the bottom shelf of the fridge

behind a truly great carton of skim milk.