October 29: Crazy With Work, Classic Saint Marty, "All Hallow's Snow"

I am going crazy with work today.  I've been preparing lessons and assignments for my mythology class.  Worked on another project that is due on Wednesday.  Tonight, I'm reading at a Halloween show in Marquette.  I have to do my makeup soon and get in costume.  I'm feeling a little exhausted right now.

A Classic Saint Marty from two years ago, when my life was still complicated . . .

October 30, 2015:  Eternal Afterlife, Cremation Stone, Edgar Allan Poe, "The Sleeper"

Lost in a kind of delirium and frightened by the prospect of an eternal afterlife in such a world, Ives would begin to doze, and finally sleep, or nearly so, soon let out a shout, waking everyone in the apartment.

After his mystical vision, Ives spends a great deal of time thinking about life after death.  Even though he is a devout Catholic, brought up to believe in Heaven and angels and salvation, Ives is uneasy about the afterlife.  His vision of colored winds and spinning suns simply confuses him even further, since it doesn't fit into the Christian paradigm of eternity.  Ives simply doesn't know what to think.

It has been a little over two months since my sister died.  My family has been waiting this whole time for her interment.  We haven't done it yet because we ordered a cremation stone.  My sister never wanted to be buried, so, instead, her cremains are going to be placed in a sculpted boulder.  It's a beautiful object, but it takes a long time to be delivered and placed.

The goal was to have the interment by about mid-October, before the snow started flying.  It is now two days away from Halloween.  No snow yet.  No stone yet.  I feel as though during these last couple of months we've all been in a kind of limbo, waiting for the final step in letting go of my sister's physical being.  When it does happen, which will be soon (I hope), it will be like tearing the scab off of a wound that's sort of healing.

This afternoon, on my way home from work, I drove by the cemetery where my sister will be laid to rest.  I stared down the road, at the place where her cremation stone will be placed.  For just a moment, I thought I saw my sister standing there.  It was a vision that came and went so fast that I'm not sure I actually saw anything at all.  However, it just reminded me of what remains unfinished.

Forgive my lachrymose mood.  I think it's the time of year.  The cold setting in.  All Souls' Day approaching.  Winter on the doorstep.

Saint Marty needs some kind of closure.  He's having a hard time moving forward.

The Sleeper

by:  Edgar Allan Poe

At midnight, in the month of June,
I stand beneath the mystic moon.
An opiate vapor, dewy, dim,
Exhales from out her golden rim,
And, softly dripping, drop by drop,
Upon the quiet mountain top,
Steals drowsily and musically
Into the universal valley.
The rosemary nods upon the grave;
The lily lolls upon the wave;
Wrapping the fog about its breast,
The ruin molders into rest;
Looking like Lethe, see! the lake
A conscious slumber seems to take,
And would not, for the world, awake.
All Beauty sleeps!- and lo! where lies
Irene, with her Destinies!

O, lady bright! can it be right-
This window open to the night?
The wanton airs, from the tree-top,
Laughingly through the lattice drop-
The bodiless airs, a wizard rout,
Flit through thy chamber in and out,
And wave the curtain canopy
So fitfully- so fearfully-
Above the closed and fringed lid
'Neath which thy slumb'ring soul lies hid,
That, o'er the floor and down the wall,
Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall!
Oh, lady dear, hast thou no fear?
Why and what art thou dreaming here?
Sure thou art come O'er far-off seas,
A wonder to these garden trees!
Strange is thy pallor! strange thy dress,
Strange, above all, thy length of tress,
And this all solemn silentness!

The lady sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,
Which is enduring, so be deep!
Heaven have her in its sacred keep!
This chamber changed for one more holy,
This bed for one more melancholy,
I pray to God that she may lie
For ever with unopened eye,
While the pale sheeted ghosts go by!

My love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep
As it is lasting, so be deep!
Soft may the worms about her creep!
Far in the forest, dim and old,
For her may some tall vault unfold-
Some vault that oft has flung its black
And winged panels fluttering back,
Triumphant, o'er the crested palls,
Of her grand family funerals-
Some sepulchre, remote, alone,
Against whose portal she hath thrown,
In childhood, many an idle stone-
Some tomb from out whose sounding door
She ne'er shall force an echo more,
Thrilling to think, poor child of sin!
It was the dead who groaned within.

And a poem from myself this evening of the Halloween Spectacle . . .

All Hallow's Snow

by:  Martin Achatz

for the victims of Hurricane Sandy
October 30, 2012

All Hallow's Eve, the snow falls
Like volcanic ash on Pompeii,
Where parents curled around children,
Cocooned them against that instant
Of God unhinged, writing in magma
A poem of dinners uneaten,
Naps unfinished, men and women
Uncoupled, frozen in need,
Bodies joined forever under
The bright trumpet of disaster.

My son and daughter, in costume, greedy
For Milky Way and candy corn, don't pay
Attention to the snow this night,
Don't know we stand in a comma,
A punctuation of ocean and arctic.
Don't know that, last night, this wind drove
The Atlantic between mother and son and daughter,
Revised with wave and darkness, created
An elegy of salt and sea and ruin.
Here is what my children know:
They go to a door, hold out their bags
To strangers, receive sweetness.
I stand behind them
In the cold, listen for Vesuvius
To open its mouth,
To sing again.