January 14: Tiring Weekend, Classic Saint Marty, "Without Words"

I went to a memorial service last night for a young man who died in a house fire last week, along with his girlfriend who was four months pregnant.  He was the son of a good friend and colleague from the English Department.  It was difficult.  After it was over, I hugged my friend.  She felt fragile, ready to break apart.

Today, I have been preparing for a medical procedure that I'm having tomorrow. 

Needless to say, it has been a long, tiring weekend.

Two years ago, I was trying to help my daughter overcome some struggles she was going through at the time . . .

January 13, 2016:  Sublimation, Daughter, Anxiety and Sadness, Ice to Steam

It's a sudden change.  One moment, solid.  The next, vapor.  Sublimation.  It's nature moving in fast forward, like a time-lapse Keystone Cops movie.  An eruption from one state into the next.  Annie Dillard witnesses this phenomenon at Tinker Creek, and it makes her reflect on wind and mares and foals.  Genesis.  The generation of something new.

Most people do not deal well with sudden change.  Sudden change is a heart attack or house fire.  A stroke or a car wreck.  Sublimation, that immediate change of states, is not comfortable.  It doesn't give a person a chance to adjust or acclimate.  It's simply a step out of an airplane into a free fall.

Certain aspects of my life are sublimating.  My daughter, whom I thought was confident and well-adjusted, tells me that, for years, she's been struggling with anxiety and sadness.  She has turned from ice to steam before my eyes.  I'm not sure if this sublimation is the result of puberty and hormones, or something deeper.  A fissure of mental illness.  It frightens me a little bit.

My daughter is going to see a doctor to talk about being mist, a cloud that was once clear and crystalline and beautiful.  Perhaps she has always been fog, and I have simply chosen to see ice (or water).  I don't know.  It's a question that's been bothering me for days, and I'm not any closer to an answer than before.

Maybe Saint Marty needs to sublimate some Bailey's.  Turn it from liquid into happiness.

Waldo, sublimating from "where" to "how"...

And another poem for my friend who lost her son . . .


Without Words

by:  Martin Achatz

Some things leave me without words.

Clouds the color of spawning salmon.

A wolf spider as fat as my thumb.

Thunder in the comma of lake-effect snow.

I struggle for adequate verbs

When faced with grasshopper borealis

Or the scream of peacock at midnight.

It’s a fault line of language, deep

As hieroglyph, untranslatable

By alphabet into the raw meat

Of what you feel this morning. 

When your baby’s heartbeat ceases. 

When joy evaporates like frost

From a windshield.  What can I give you

This day of ash and sackcloth?

I open my arms to you, try

To wrap them around the universe

Of your shoulders.

God blinded Saul to peel the scales

From his eyes, make him embrace

Love.  God makes me mute.

Please, take my silence.

Turn it into what you need most.

Tuna casserole.  Jim Beam.  Lasagna.

Fluke of whale.  Minaret of Taj Mahal.

I try to shape my tongue

Into a gift of gold or myrrh to leave

At your empty crib.