September 17: Homemade Blueberry Jam, Classic Saint Marty, "Metamorphoses"

Sorry for my absence yesterday.  I was out doing poet stuff in a near-by town.  Read with a poet friend of mine under a pavilion by a beautiful lake.  It was a warm and lazy kind of day, where nobody seems in a hurry to do anything.  I ended up meeting quite a few wonderful people and picked up a jar of homemade blueberry jam.

Today, it was church in the morning.  Schoolwork in the afternoon.  Then reading and more reading.  Maybe some writing, if I'm lucky.

Today's episode of Classic Saint Marty first aired two years ago, and I was talking to a good friend about suffering and tragedy . . .

September 17, 2017:  Eerie Shadows, Balloon Viscera, Laura Boss, "I Don't Visit My Father's Grave"

...One night, while working late, Ives, in his fatigue, staggered out to Madison Avenue, for as far as he could see, the office buildings were casting eerie shadows, and he felt the world a lonely and dreadful place.  He often awoke with a gasp in the middle of the night, his heartbeat accelerated, his breathing shallow, his heart filled with sadness, his head with memory.

Ives grieves for a long time.  He grieves so long that his wife considers divorce.  Ives grieves.  His daughter goes to Nepal, comes back, gets married, and has kids.  Ives grieves.  His best friend's wife dies.  And still Ives grieves.  For close to two hundred pages, Ives is in a constant state of sadness

I don't know why, but I thought I would somehow be beyond crying over my sister's death by now.  I had it all figured out.  I allowed myself to be angry and sad for two weeks.  At the beginning of September, back to work and teaching.  No more time for tears or being pissed off.  That was my schedule.

It hasn't worked out so well for me.  I can go for a few hours, maybe a day.  Suddenly, I'm walking to my car or brushing my teeth or eating a banana, and I start crying and can't stop.  I was talking to a good friend from the English Department, and he asked me how I was doing.  I told him about my attacks of sorrow, and he said, "Well, yeah.  You're going to be recovering from this for the rest of your life."

We talked about how the human race is united by tragedy and sadness.

"Why can't we be united by balloon animals or something?" he said.

I told him that, every time I tried to make a balloon dog or swan, it turns into balloon intestines.

"That's it," my friend said.  "We should be united by balloon viscera.  Something that lifts us up from inside."

Saint Marty's had a good day.  Good day working.  Good day teaching.  No anger.  No sadness.  Just balloon viscera raising him higher and higher.

I Don't Visit My Father's Grave

by:  Laura Boss

I don't visit my father's grave
don't put stones on his tombstone
don't say prayers
don't forget him


And another poem for this quiet Sunday afternoon about autumn changes . . .

Metamorphoses

by:  Martin Achatz

I want to speak about bodies

Changed into new forms.

My daughter, ten, on the verge

Of petal, stigma, ovule, sepal,

Talks of All Hallows Eve, the form

She will assume when Selene

Rises into the starry heavens.

Talks of the living dead, hunger

For the taste of flesh, of body.

Then changes her mind.

She will be straw in cornfield,

Blight against crow feather.

Then she chooses

A fairy nymph of cobweb,

Draped in lace and silk,

Arachne’s fine handiwork,

Fat with flies and moth wing.

Her muse shifts yet again.

She will be spell caster.

Pointed hat, frog skin,

Green and marbled with the dark

Matter of the universe.  And now,

Her final mutation, she will be

A girl, red-cloaked, a penchant

For forest and hairy stranger

In her young breast.  I fear

This form most.  Fear she won’t

Want to morph back on All Soul’s Day.

Fear she will just keep changing

States.  Liquid.  Solid.  Vapor.

Until she drifts away from me,

Or becomes some creature I don’t know

How to love.