March 4: Great Birds and Beasts, World Wildlife Day, "Portrait of the Virgin Mary as Skunk"

Santiago admires the birds and beasts . . . 

"If you're not tired, fish," he said aloud, "you must be very strange."

He felt very tired now and he knew the night would come soon and he tried to think of other things. He thought of the Big Leagues, to him they were the Gran Ligas, and he knew that the Yankees of New York were playing the Tigres of Detroit.

This is the second day now that I do not know the result of the juegos, he thought. But I must have confidence and I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel. What is a bone spur? he asked himself. Un espuela de hueso. We do not have them. Can it be as painful as the spur of a fighting cock in one's heel? I do not think I could endure that or the loss of the eye and of both eyes and continue to fight as the fighting cocks do. Man is not much beside the great birds and beasts. Still I would rather be that beast down there in the darkness of the sea.

Santiago must be very strange.  Or very normal.  He wants to be the fish down in the dark waters below him.  And roosters fighting each other blind.  Perhaps it has something to do with tenacity and the instinct to fight, despite being in pain and wounded.  That feral instinct that exists in all creatures.

Last night, I led a poetry workshop for World Wildlife Day, which is March 3.  For two hours, everyone got in touch with their spirit animals.  We wrote about mammoths and vaquitas and swans and wolves.  The hairy and feathered and scaled.  Extinct and near extinct.  

My stuff was alive on the page.  A fish fighting on a line.  A porpoise launching itself at the stars.  A black bear fleeing a pack of beagles.  The other writers captured similar creatures.  It was a veritable menagerie of verse.

I was exhausted when the workshop began, but I found energy in those animals.  They gave me second wind.  Life.  Writing often does that for me.  In fact, I think that the only time I'm really alive is when I have a pen in my hand.  It's when I am fully myself.

Right now, typing this post, I grow fur, sprout feathers, breathe fins.  This is me.  Wild.  Untamed.  Each syllable, a lion charging an antelope.  

Can you hear Saint Marty roaring?

A poem from last night . . . 

Portrait of the Virgin Mary as Skunk

by  Martin Achatz

She shambles, slow as a mud puddle,

bright arm of lightning splitting

the night of her body, peacock

plume tail sweeping the ground

behind her, the way, I imagine,

Mary swept sawdust from her floors

after Joseph was done for the day.

And think of that smell, part terror,

part warning.  Mary calling

her son to supper, him ignoring her,

turning stones into toads, leaves 

into salamanders.  When he didn't

answer, Mary unleashed her quiet

wrath until it settled on his godly

skin, pickled him in maternal love.