October 1: Five Days, Lisel Mueller, "Tears"

Yes, only five more days until Saint Marty's Day.  Five more days of last minute shopping and gift wrapping and baking.  I'm not saying it's too late to get prepared, but, if you're depending on Amazon to get your Saint Marty's Day presents, you better get started.

It's been a pretty long day.  I watched 2001:  A Space Odyssey with my students this evening.  Tried to prepare them for it.  Apes and monoliths and deadly computers and such.  When I told them that the first five minutes of the film was a black screen with music, they looked at me as though I was speaking Urdu.  They weren't thrilled.

I have a Lisel Mueller poem about sorrow.  I've been thinking a lot about happiness and sadness in the last couple of days.  It's the normal array of problems:  money, exhaustion, auto, health.  My wife discovered some unexpected expenses on Monday, and suddenly we find ourselves on a very tight budget for the next couple of weeks.  My ear is sore.  I think I'm coming down with an ear infection.  I think the transmission is acting up on my car.  And the first case of Ebola has been diagnosed in the United States.

Yet, I really don't have anything to complain about.  I have two jobs.  A home.  Two great kids.  A laptop computer.  The Big Bang Theory is on TV.  I should be happy a majority of the time, minus the occasional bout of gastrointestinal distress due to the ingestion of too much buttered movie popcorn.  Of course, that would require me to ignore everything that I just listed in the previous paragraph.

Saint Marty isn't really good at ignoring potential plagues or unpaid bills or earaches.

Tears

by:  Lisel Mueller

The first woman who ever wept
was appalled at what stung
her eyes and ran down her cheeks.
Saltwater.  Seawater.
How was it possible?
Hadn't she and the man
spent many days moving
upland to where the grass
flourished, where the stream
quenched their thirst with sweet water?
How could she have carried these sea drops
as if they were precious seeds;
where could she have stowed them?
She looked at the watchful gazelles
and the heavy-lidded frogs;
she looked at glass-eyed birds
and nervous, black-eyed mice.
None of them wept, not even the fish
that dripped in her hands when she caught them.
Not even the man.  Only she
carried the sea inside her body.

Open the pod bay doors...