March 26-28: Poetry Workshop, Snow, Something I Wrote

This will be a Merton-less post.  Too tired for much reflection tonight.

It has been a busy day.  I woke this morning to about five or six inches of snow.  A storm blew in overnight.  After a week or so of spring weather, greening grass, fifty-degree days, winter returned with a vengeance.  Wet and heavy as a load of laundry.

Church in the morning.  Grocery shopping in the afternoon.  Cooked dinner.  Met with my book club.  Flight of the Diamond Smugglers by my friend Matt Frank.  Then, I led a poetry workshop.  Got done a little after 9 p.m.

I'm beat.  But, I wanted to share something I wrote this evening.  Not sure if it counts as a poem.

Saint Marty is not quite ready to face another week.

Reading Yellow Dog

by:  Martin Achatz

It sits on the top shelf, left-hand side, first
stack. Its cover antique yellow, a Daguerreotype
book--something that would look natural
in a Mathew Brady Civil War photo, ground
strewn with wounded, dead. I can imagine
it in the white fingers of a fallen soldier, clutched
like the picture of a wife or girlfriend. These poems,
simple as birch bark, profound as sparrow song, fill
me with feelings I haven't experienced in 40 or more
years, sitting in front of a potbellied stove, reading
Conan and Red Sonja comic books with my sisters,
hearing something large and black nose through
the garbage in the dark outside. 

I open the book's cover, to where 

its author wrote a note to me

three wars ago: For Martin, 

who knows the bear.