April 24, 2026: “The Meadow,” Poetry and Poetry and Poetry, “Some Thoughts from the Ghost of Mary Oliver”

Some things can change your life forever.  Certainly, falling in love qualifies.  Experiencing a death, as well.  Getting a new job.  Going back to school.  Moving to a new town or state or country.  Watching Star Wars: A New Hope for the first time.  (Hey, it changed my life.)

These experiences are powerfully instructive.  They teach you about yourself.  The first poem by Sharon Olds I ever read (“The Pope’s Penis”) made me want to be a poet.  Because of Olds’ bravery and boldness., I realized no subject was off limits.  I could write about anything.  Language was the key to the world.

Marie Howe writes about the power of language . . . 

The Meadow

by: Marie Howe

As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so
the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together

and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers.
Imperceptibly heaving with the old impatience, it knows

for certain that two horses walk upon it, weary of hay.
The horses, sway-backed and self important, cannot divine

how the small white pony mysteriously escapes the fence every day.
This is the miracle just beyond their heavy-headed grasp,

and they turn from his nuzzling with irritation. Everything
is crying out. Two crows, rising from the hill, fight

and caw-cry in mid-flight, then fall and light on the meadow grass
bewildered by their weight. A dozen wasps drone, tiny prop planes,

sputtering into a field the farmer has not yet plowed,
and what I thought was a phone, turned down and ringing,

is the knock of a woodpecker for food or warning, I can’t say.
I want to add my cry to those who would speak for the sound alone.

But in this world, where something is always listening, even
murmuring has meaning, as in the next room you moan

in your sleep, turning into late morning. My love, this might be
all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget

what you are. There will come a day when the meadow will think
suddenly, water, root, blossom, through no fault of its own,

and the horses will lie down in daisies and clover. Bedeviled,
human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words

that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled
among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.

I love that last phrase—“the sentence that could change your life.”  It’s a powerful thought.  We all carry in our mouths words that can cause earthquakes, heal broken hearts, end hunger, stop wars.  Think about it.  If a war can be started by one lunatic who can’t string together a coherent thought, then peace can be achieved by a sane person who’s not afraid to say, “Give peace a chance.”  (Thank you, John Lennon.)

Sorry that it has taken me so long to give an update after my last post about my wife’s health issues.  I’ve been eyeballs deep in poetry for over a week.  Last weekend, I visited a high school in Ann Arbor to talk poetry with the students.  Then I participated in a reading at a bookstore in Dexter, Michigan.  The next day, we drove to Detroit, had pizza with some family members I don’t get to see very often, including my grandniece Abby (one of my son’s favorite people).  Then I read poems at Next Chapter Books in Detroit.  (My first appearance in the Motor City—and my family came to support me.)

I didn’t have much of a chance to recover from this trip.  Monday, I dove right into the Great Lakes Poetry Festival at the library where I work.  Readings and writing workshops and movies and presentations.  Poetry and poetry and poetry.  I was surrounded by people who seize every day by the throat and refuse to let go.  Poets.

I’m pretty exhausted tonight, but it’s a good exhaustion.  Birthday exhaustion.  Christmas exhaustion.  You get the idea.  It’s as if I’ve been laughing for a week straight, and now my sides are hurting and eyes are watering.  I could happily sleep for a week, drunk on poetry.

As John Keating says in Dead Poets Society, “No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.”

Saint Marty wrote a new ghost poem this week . . . 

Some Thoughts from the Ghost of Mary Oliver

by: Martin Achatz

You think you know me because you’ve read

my poems about Blackwater Pond and geese,

bears digging honey from rotten tree trunks.

But I never wrote about stepping onto my front 

porch just as sun unzipped the horizon at dawn

and song sparrows shivered the pines with their

hungry music.  I never scribbled how good it was

to stand in that cold air before the woods 

stretched and yawned, how much I enjoyed 

my first wild and precious cigarette of the day.

April 19, 2026: “ What the Angels Left,” Hospital, “Ode to Cheese and Crackers”

The last four or five days have been a rollercoaster.

On Tuesday, my wife texted me, telling me that it felt like an elephant was sitting on her chest and her jaw was aching.  Having worked in a cardiology office for about eight years, I knew she needed to go to the ER.  (You wouldn’t believe the number of times I spoke to patients on the phone experiencing symptoms of a heart attack and asking me what they should do.  The answer was always the same:  CALL AN AMBULANCE! or GET TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM!)

Two days later, my wife was still in the hospital, and we still didn’t have any answers.  First and foremost—we do know she did NOT have a heart attack.  All the testing (bloodwork, EKGs, stress test, echocardiogram) proved that.  What the doctors couldn’t figure out is why her heart rate kept falling into the 40s.  The first morning, she couldn’t complete her stress test because her heart rate fell to 39 bpm (that’s “beats per minute” for my non-medical disciples).  

Of course there have been moments of grace over through this whole ordeal—simple kindnesses like text messages and an occasional piece of chocolate—and I know that there were tons of people praying for my wife.

Marie Howe writes about unexpected grace . . . 

What the Angels Left

by: Marie Howe

At first, the kitchen scissors seemed perfectly harmless.

They lay on the kitchen table in the blue light.

Then I began to notice them all over the house,

at night in the pantry, or filling up bowls in the cellar

where there should have been apples.  They appeared under rugs,

lumpy places where one would usually settle before the fire,

or suddenly shining in the sink at the bottom of soupy water.

Once, I found a pair in the garden, stuck in turned dirt

among the new bulbs, and one night, under my pillow,

I felt something like a cool long tooth and pulled them out

to lie next to me in the dark.  Soon after that I began 

to collect them, filling boxes, old shopping bags,

every suitcase I owned.  I grew slightly uncomfortable

when company came.  What if someone noticed them

when looking for forks or replacing dried dishes?  I longed

to throw them out, but how could I get rid of something

that felt oddly like grace?  It occurred to me finally

that I was to use them, and I resisted a growing cumpulsion

to cut my hair, although, in moments of great distraction,

I thought it was my eyes they wanted, or my soft-belly

—exhausted, in winter, I laid them out on the lawn.

The snow fell quiet as usual, without any apparent hesitation

or discomfort.  In spring, as I expected, they were gone.

In their place, a slight metallic smell, and the clear muddy earth.

I think what Howe is getting at in this poem are graces that don’t seem like graces at first:  missing a bus and finding out later that the missed bus got hit by a train; getting sick on Christmas thereby avoiding a family get-together that ended in tears and screaming; or not eating dinner and hearing that everyone who DID eat ended up with food poisoning.  You get the idea.  The scissors seem like a plague, but, in actuality, they are gifts from angels.

My wife did her second stress test on Thursday morning without any problems.  By noon, she was discharged from the hospital sporting a 30-day Holter monitor.  By 3:30 p.m., our car was packed, and we were on the road for a whirlwind weekend of poetry readings in Ann Arbor, Dexter, and Detroit.  (More on that in an upcoming post.)

So, you may be asking, where is the grace in all of that?

Answer:  all of our family and friends.

Being in the hospital can be a pretty isolating experience, but we never felt that.  My sister-in-law and brother-in-law waited in the ER with us.  One of my best friends (who happens to be the head of the cardiology clinic) made sure my wife’s tests were completed as quickly as possible.  Another friend who’s a cardiology nurse stopped by to see how we were holding up.  It was simply grace upon grace upon grace from everyone (and that includes my friends and family from downstate).

Here’s a poem about grace that Saint Marty wrote . . .

Ode to Cheese and Crackers

by: Martin Achatz

Nothing special.  Saltines.  Kraft American

cheese slices.  I sit on the couch at 11 p.m.,

home from the hospital where I left

my wife in a bed, her heart singing

lullabies on a screen at the nurses’ station.

I place the cheese and crackers on my tongue

like communion wafers, blessed by the salt

crunch, creamy orange blandness, the way

I used to feel blessed when my mother gave

me Campbell’s Chicken Noodle when I was home

sick as a kid and I believed she could cure

leprosy, raise the dead with a can opener

and microwave oven while Bob Barker

dispensed miracles to the sick and lame

on the TV as long as they promised

to spay and neuter their pets.

April 13, 2026: “Death, the Last Visit,” Emily Dickinson, “Writing a Poem”

It’s Monday night.  Just got home from the library after showing a movie about the life of Emily Dickinson.  A Quiet Passion.  I’d seen it before.  Thought it was a perfect choice for National Poetry Month.

I’m not going to write a whole lot tonight.  I’m tired.  I think it has something to do with the dreary weather.  Driving to and from work today, the fog was so thick I worried I was going to run into a deer that got lost in the woods and wandered onto the mist-choked highway.

Marie Howe gets a little Emily Dickinson-esque . . . 

Death, the Last Visit

by: Marie Howe

Hearing the low growl in your throat, you’ll know that it’s started.

It has nothing to ask you.  It only has something to say, and

it will speak in your own tongue.

Locking its arm around you, it will hold you as long as you ever wanted.

Only this time it will be long enough.  It will not let go.

Burying your face in its dark shoulder you’ll smell mud and hair and water.

You’ll taste your mother’s sour nipple, your favorite salty cock

and swallow a word you thought you’d spit out once and be done with.

Through half-closed eyes you’ll see that its shadow looks like yours,

a perfect fit.  You could weep with gratefulness.  It will take you

as you like it best, hard and fast as a slap across the face,

or so sweet and slow you’ll scream give it to me until it does.

Nothing will ever reach this deep.  Nothing will ever clench this hard.

At last (the little girls are clapping, shouting) someone has pulled

the drawstring of your gym bag closed enough and tight.  At last

someone has knotted the lace of your shoe so it won’t ever come undone.

Even as you turn into it, even as you begin to feel yourself stop,

you’ll whistle with amazement between your residual teeth oh jesus

oh sweetheart, oh holy mother, nothing nothing nothing ever felt this good.

It’s funny.  I wrote a poem this evening about death, as well.  Most poets are pretty obsessed with mortality.  It’s one of the pitfalls of being a poet.  Death kindly stops for you all the time.

Here is Saint Marty’s new poem . . . 

Writing a Poem

by: Martin Achatz

Doesn’t it always start with a question,

like why is that snowman standing alone

in a field or how did Mom make perfect

pancakes every time or did my sister

feel my hand holding hers in those last

breath moments before her lungs went

to sleep and heart became a drumbeat

on a distant battlefield, when hearing

was all she had left, my voice entering

her ear canal, slowly drifting toward

the shores of her mind—a kid’s

inner tube blown across the lake by

a summer squall until it washes

ashore, finds a home in cattails where

it waits to be remembered, claimed

like a lost soul?

April 12, 2026: “Part of Eve’s Discussion,” Wild Week, “A Whole Civilization”

It has been a wild week.  

Tuesday morning, President #47 threatened to wipe out “a whole civilization.”  You read that right—he said he was going to genocide the country of Iran if it didn’t open up the Strait of Hormuz.  After his post on Truth Social, the whole world seemed to be holding its breath, not sure if the orange lunatic was going to actually start World War III.

If you’ve ever lived through the threat of some kind of apocalyptic weather/environmental event—hurricane, blizzard, tsunami, volcanic eruption—that’s what it felt like.  The planet was teetering on the brink of something cataclysmic, and only one person could prevent it.  And that one person was/is a mentally unstable Putin wannabe.  

Don’t worry.  This post isn’t going to be a political rant.  Y’all know I stand on the side of compassion, kindness, empathy, and freedom.  You know, all that shit you heard in church last Easter Sunday.  No, I won’t go all Sam Kinison on you (The man’s a fuckin’ baby with nuclear codes!!!!  Ahhhh, ahhhhhh, ahhhhhhhh!!!!!).   I’m more interested in that collective held breath—everyone waiting to see what was going to happen.  Like Christmas morning, except Santa Claus has missiles packed in his sleigh.

Marie Howe writes about just-before moments . . . 

Part of Eve’s Discussion

by: Marie Howe

It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand,

and flies, just before it flies, the moment when rivers seem to still

and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when

a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop,

very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you

your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like

the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say,

it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only

all the time.

Howe is talking about an anticipated experience that never materializes—a bird right before eating from your palm, a river right before a squall, a car right before it starts spinning on lake ice.  If you’re anything like me, you’ve already imagined the experience in your mind.  The bird has already gorged itself on the seed.  The storm has already whipped the river into froth.  The car has already spun and spun and spun like an amusement park ride.  

I think the world has become so focused on speed.  We want the fastest cell phones.  Fastest cars.  Fastest WiFi connections.  Call it the Era of Instant Gratification.  Anticipation is practically non-existent.  Movies don’t even stay in theaters all that long anymore.  They’re released, and, four weeks later, they’re streaming on Netflix or HBO Max.  You don’t have to wait six months or a year for the DVD or Blu-ray.  

President #47 did NOT go through with his threat.  Supposedly, there’s a two-week moratorium on bombing between Iran, Israel, and the United States.  (Somebody needs to let Netanyahu know about this ceasefire, by the way.)  The bird flew off without eating the seed.  The storm blew itself out like a birthday candle.  And the car’s tires found traction.  For two weeks.  Then, all bets are off.

As Howe says at the end of her poem, “. . . it was still like that, only / all the time.”  It’s exhausting living in a state of constant anticipation.  Even if Tuesday’s  threat has been postponed, it’s still present.  And the people of the United States have been living on this edge like this for close to ten years now.  Almost an entire generation of young people only remember #47 and Joe Biden as Presidents of the United States.  (You can argue with me if you want, but at least President Biden never brought us to the brink of armageddon, and he isn’t a convicted felon.)

We are a divided country.  That’s a fact.  Also a fact:  the inmates are in charge of the asylum right now.  When my kids and grandkids read this post dozens of years from now, I want them to know I stood on the side of love and kindness during this held-breath moment.  And I will continue to do so.  

I have friends who are incredibly pessimistic about the future.  That’s not me.  I believe that democracy is still alive in the United States.  The fact that Hungarian dictator Viktor Orbán lost the election in his country by a landslide today gives me hope.  In the end, good people win, and despots end up on the trash heap.  We will recover from the past ten years of MAGA-induced insanity, but it will take a while.  No instant gratification available.  Sorry millennials.

In the meantime, we gather, protest, speak up, speak out, listen to and recite poetry at readings (like I did today), and sing songs.  

Here’s a poem Saint Marty wrote last Tuesday . . . 

A Whole Civilization

by: Martin Achatz

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
                    --- Donald Trump

We sit on this side of the world,
complain about egg prices, milk
prices, pill prices. We pump gas
into our SUVs, complain about that, too.
We have to get to Florida for our spring breaks.
Because we’re civilized.

They sit on the other side of the world,
wait for the whistle of missiles,
watch skies on fire, and dig
their daughters’ bodies from school
rubble. They weep, wail, tear their clothes,
wonder how frightened their children
were when heaven collapsed on top of them.
Because they’re civilized.