July 2: Painterly Skills, What's Best for You, Patricia Lockwood, "Bedbugs Conspire to Keep Me from Greatness"

Certainly he would have been a printer if he hadn't been so interested in drawing.  He took classes whenever he could and had the good fortune of studying with George Bridgeman for figure drawing and Max Bechman for painting at the Art Students League.  Although he had never been the most talented of artists, as he'd tell his son, Robert, years later, he had a highly developed work ethic.  A conscientious and self-effacing laborer, ever humble before his craft, he never thought he'd have any money and figured out, as a young man, that he would always live humbly, "without means," practicing his illustrative and painterly skills into his old age...

That's a pretty realistic dream for a would-be artist.  A life of struggle and near poverty.  Jobs that almost pay the bills but give him time to paint or sketch.  Ives isn't really about money or fame.  He simply loves the creative process. He works at it constantly.  Of course, when he marries and has children, Ives has to forgo the life of the struggling artist.  He gets a job in advertising to provide for his wife and kids.  And his dreams change.

The circumstances of life force everyone to make choices.  Dreams are altered or even abandoned.  Ives doesn't become Picasso, with paintings hanging in museums across the globe.  He becomes a mid-level advertising executive.  I always thought I would have written and published three or four books by now, won some literary awards, and maybe traveled a little.  That is not my life.

My sister--the one who's so ill-- always dreamed of being a nurse her whole life.  She graduated from high school, went to college and studied nursing, graduated, and got a job at a local hospital.  She worked midnight shifts, afternoons, and days.  She transferred to the operating room and found her passion.  She loved surgical nursing.  Eventually, she oversaw the construction of a outpatient surgery center, which she managed until about ten months ago.

Yet, my sister, who was also my boss for almost 17 years, taught me a very important lesson:  work is not life.  Family is life.  Brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews.  That's where my sister has always found her greatest joy.  One of my sister's favorite sayings as my boss was, "You've got to do what's best for you."

So, tonight, after I put my son to bed, I'm going to sit down and work on a new poem.  My dreams have changed.  I used to dream about being the world's greatest poet.  Getting invitations to read and teach at Harvard, Columbia, Cambridge.  Now I dream about being the world's greatest husband/father/poet.  I want my wife and kids to have the best life I can give them, and maybe write some great poems along the way.

Saint Marty's doing what's best, for himself and everyone he loves.

Saint Marty is surrounding himself with love.

Bedbugs Conspire to Keep Me from Greatness

by:  Patricia Lockwood

     In the cities all the poets, and in all the cities,
bedbugs.  Fat with their black lyric blood!  Alive
at only night, and there and then not there.  Better
bedbugs than the ones that eat paper, say poets--
               the ones that eat paper are in out blood
and the bedbugs eat them up, rip rip, and out paper
creamily goes on whole, with not a single real space
between sentences in it.  They say come to the cities
and there
     become Great!  The poets have money to spend
in the cities:  they spend the newest American dollars,
the crisp-aired greenest American dollars, blazing
     with pictures of National Parks.  "The Old Faithful
Geyser almost gushes off the note!"  At last money admits
the power of poetry, at last money admits it is written
on--and this piece of paper almost gushes, so go to a city
     and spend it.  The poets in cities save their money
and travel to National Parks, and never sleep at night
there, no one sleeps in a National Park, they stay up late
and inseminate each other with memories of mountains
and glimpses of wildlife, and human reflections in stilly
chill lakes, and afterward they lie awake, miles away
from any city, miles away from their living mattresses
               where their absent shapes are getting sucked
for their blood.  Oh the bedbugs are happy; in bedbug prison,
the locked-up poet is writing his poems, in blood just like
the first time.  Oh the poets are happy back in the cities, there
are legible smears on their sheets every day, and a pricking
always on their skin like something is coming
for them through the grass, long green grass
                                                     of where they came from.

Amen to that.