October 30: "Music Lessons," Flesh and Bone of Home, Wife's 50th Birthday

Mary Oliver takes . . .

Music Lessons

by:  Mary Oliver

Sometimes, in the middle of the lesson,

we exchanged places.  She would gaze a moment at her

     hands

spread over the keys; then the small house with its knick-

     knacks,

its shut windows,

its photographs of her sons and the serious husband,

vanished as new shapes formed.  Sound

became music, and music a white

scarp for the listener to climb

alone.  I leaped rock over rock to the top

and found myself waiting, transformed,

and still she played, her eyes luminous and willful,

her pinned hair falling down--

forgetting me, the house, the neat green yard,

she fled in that lick of flame all tedious bonds:

supper, the duties of flesh and home,

the knife at the throat, the death in the metronome.

I took music lessons for almost 12 or 15 years when I was young, and I remember those times when my piano teacher would take control of the bench and play something.  It was always a thrill for me, watching her flee, in that lick of musical flame, all the tedious bonds of the world and life.  Children.  Husband.  The flesh and bone of home.  

Cue the opening piano chords to "The Rose."

Speaking of the flesh and bone of home, today was my wife's 50th birthday.  Of those 50 years, we have been together for 34 of them, married for 28 of them.  That's a long time.  It hasn't always been easy.  Some of those years have been filled with growing pains--loss, grief, estrangement.  Some of those years have been marked by celebration--weddings, births, graduations.  As I've said in previous posts, you can't have light without darkness, joy without sadness  

My wife inspires me daily to be a better person--a better partner, husband, father, teacher, poet, friend.  She's done that for me since the day we first met.  After being together for almost 35 years, you would think that I'd be damn near perfect by now.  I'm not, of course.  But that's the other part of love--accepting a person's flaws and failures, as well.

I went out to Red Lobster for dinner with my wife and son tonight.  Her choice.  We had a great meal (accompanied by a few great drinks) and capped it off with some kind of molten lava brownie ice cream dessert.  My son, as a birthday present for my wife, didn't complain about being tired or bored the entire time we were eating.  That's pretty good for a 15-year-old boy.

It takes a lot of practice to become proficient at the piano, as Mary Oliver hints.  Anything you want to do well requires hard work, and marriage is hard work.  After almost 30 years, I still need practice, because I fuck up frequently.  

My wife knows that, and she still loves me.  

Saint Marty wishes his beautiful bride a joyous fiftieth birthday.  Hopefully, she'll share a few leftover Cheddar Bay Biscuits with him tomorrow.

October 22: "Snakes in Winter," Rimed with White, Therapy

Mary Oliver and serpents . . . 

Snakes in Winter

by:  Mary Oliver

Deep in the woods,

under the sprawled upheavals of rocks,

dozens lie coiled together.

Touch them:  they scarcely

breathe; they stare

out of such deep forgetfulness

that their eyes are like jewels--

and asleep, through they cannot close.

And in each month the forked tongue,

sensitive as an angel's ear,

lies like a drugged muscle.

With the fires of spring they will lash forth again

on their life of ribs!--

bodies like whips!

But now under the lids of the mute

succeeding snowfalls

they sleep in their cold cauldron:  a flickering broth

six months below simmer.

The world is getting ready for its long winter's nap.  Like the snakes in Oliver's poem, the woods and lakes around me will soon fall into a state a deep forgetfulness until the fires of spring lash forth again.  The flickering broth of snow and ice is just below the horizon of sunrise.

Winter used to be my favorite season of the entire rolling year.  Until I grew up and had to shovel that

shit.  Nowadays, I'm a summer addict.  I love stepping outside my front door at 1 a.m. and hearing the peepers and crickets sending up their summer ostinato to the stars and moon.  Love not having to worry about heating bills and frozen water pipes.  

Unfortunately, eight months of the year, the Upper Peninsula is rimed with white.

This evening, I led an online poetry workshop.  Several of my best poetry friends showed up to write with me.  It's one of my favorite things to do on Sunday nights,  kicking off a new week with fellowship and laughter and poems.  It puts me in a positive frame of mind to face the inevitability of another Monday.  Tonight, especially, was good therapy for me--all of the writing prompts based on some of my favorite poems by some of my favorite poets.

Yes, I said therapy, because poetry does elicit strong emotional responses from me.  As does writing.  The thought of winter does bring on doldrums in me.  Like Oliver's snakes, I just want to find a hole, crawl into it, and wait for the world to thaw.  Picking up pen and journal, or sitting down with my laptop to tap out a blog post, is therapeutic.  Often, after I'm done writing, I feel energized, as if my soul/psyche has just risen from a long hibernation.

Winter is on the way.  I can taste it in the air like wood smoke.  Soon, my little part of the world will be an Ansel Adams winterscape--all monochrome and frozen.

But Saint Marty is warm tonight because of the simmer of friends and words and poetry.

October 21: "Sleeping in the Forest," Blinders, Hatred and Cruetly

Mary Oliver spends a night in the woods . . .

Sleeping in the Forest

by:  Mary Oliver

I thought the earth

remembered me, she

took me back so tenderly, arranging

her dark skirts, her pockets

full of lichens and seeds.  I slept

as never before, a stone

on the riverbed, nothing

between me and the white fire of the stars

but my thoughts, and they floated

light as moths among the branches

of the perfect trees.  All night

I heard the small kingdoms breathing

around me, the insects, and the birds

who do their work in the darkness.  All night

I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling

with a luminous doom. By morning

I had vanished at least a dozen times

into something better.

Oliver is surrounded by the small kingdoms of the wild--insect and bird--breathing their dark work.  She says she rises and falls all night, as if floating in a midnight pond or lake, facing a luminous doom, disappearing over and over into the goodness of the universe.

It's not an easy thing to lose yourself, to give up the insectile or elephantine struggles of every day.  Humans have a habit of wearing blinders, to blot out all else but what is in front of their eyes, and, of course, what is in front of their eyes is only what they choose to see.

In the last couple weeks, the Middle East has been torn apart by conflict and violence.  I've been aware, in a superficial way, of the ongoing hostilities, just like I'm aware in a superficial way of the ongoing violence in the Ukraine.  (Notice, I'm not using the word "war," but perhaps that's just me wearing my blinders.)  I guess I'm just like every other person--unless I'm directly affected by the violence taking place in the world, I don't pay as close attention as I do, say, to prices at the gas pump.

I'm not willfully ignoring the situation in Israel.  Simply put, I haven't had the opportunity to sit down and try to understand what's going on.  Thus, I haven't been actively worrying about the possibility of an all-out nuclear holocaust.  I truly don't get hatred, no matter what motivates it.  (This coming from a white male who has benefitted from white male privilege his whole life.)  

I have witnessed cruelty up close and personal.  I grew up with a sister who had Down syndrome and was the target of bullying most of her school career.  Ignorance and intolerance were classmates of my sister, never missing an opportunity to take advantage of her defenselessness.  

My sister loved singing, and she was in the high school chorus.  She didn't sing well, but she sang with more heart and passion than all the rest of the students in the chorus combined.  When she sang, she moved her shoulders, danced.  She couldn't help it.  Well, just before one performances, another member of the chorus told my sister to just mouth the words and not use her voice.  "You're making us sound bad," the girl said.  My sister stood on the stage that night, not moving or singing, looking like her puppy had just been killed by a car.

That's what I'm talking about--how human beings can be so cruel and hateful to each other.  I just don't get it.  

When countries go to war, innocent people die.  That's fact.  I'm not sure any cause or disagreement is worth that price.  And when someone is deliberately cruel and intolerant, innocent people suffer.  Nothing warrants that kind of heartbreak, either.

Don't wear blinders.  Look far.  Notice.  Open your mouth and speak up for the innocent and weak.  Be a vessel of peace instead of a conduit of hatred.

Saint Marty wants to make the world golden instead of filling it with darkness.

October 20: "Three Poems for James Wright," People I've Lost, Perpetual Light

Mary Oliver says farewell to a friend . . . 

Three Poems for James Wright

by:  Mary Oliver

1.  Hearing of Your Illness

I went out

from the news of your illness

like a broken bone.

I spoke your name

to the sickle moon and saw her white wing

fall back toward the blackness, but she

rowed deep past that hesitation, and

kept rising

Then I went down

to a black creek and alder grove

that is Ohio like nothing else is

and told them.  There was an owl there,

sick of its hunger but still

trapped in it, unable to be anything else.

And the creek

rippled on down over some dark rocks

and the alders

breathed fast in their red blossoms.

Then I lay down in a rank and spring-sweet field.

Weeds sprouting in the darkness, and some

small creatures rustling about, living their lives

as they do, moment by moment.

I felt better, telling them about you.

They know what pain is, and they knew you, 

and they would have stopped too, as I

was longing to do, everything, the hunger

and the flowing.

That they could not--

merely loved you and waited 

to take you back

as a stone,

as a small quick Ohio creek,

as the beautiful pulse of everything,

meanwhile not missing one shred of their own

assignments of song

and muscle--

was what I learned there, so I

got up finally, with a grief

worthy of you, and went home.

2.  Early Morning in Ohio

A late snowfall.

In the white morning the trains

whistle and bang in the freightyard,

shifting track, getting ready

to get on with it, to roll out

into the country again to get

far away from here and closer

to somewhere else.

A mile away, leaving the house, I hear them

and stop, astonished.

Of course, I thought they would stop

when you did.  I thought you'd never sicken

anyway, or, if you did, Ohio

would fall down too, barn

by bright barn, into

hillsides of pain:  torn boards,

bent nails, shattered

windows.  My old dog

who doesn't know yet he is only mortal

bounds limping away

through the weeds, and I don't do

anything to stop him.  

I remember 

what you said.

And think how somewhere is Tuscany

a small spider might even now

be stepping forth, testing

the silks of her web, the morning air,

the possibilities; maybe even, who knows,

singing a tiny song.

And if the whistling of the trains drags through me

like wire, well, I can hurt can't I?  The white fields

burn or my eyes swim, whichever; anyway I whistle

to the old dog and when he comes finally

I fall to my knees in the glittering snow, I throw

my arms around him.

3.  The Rose

I had a red rose to send you,

but it reeked of occasion, I thought,

so I didn't.  Anyway

it was the time

the willows do what they do

every spring, so I cut some

down by a dark Ohio creek and was ready

to mail them to you when the news came

that nothing

could come to you

in time anymore 

ever.

I put down the phone

and I thought I saw, on the floor of the room, suddenly,

a large box,

and I knew, the next thing I had to do, 

was lift it

and I didn't know if I could.

Well, I did.

But don't call it anything

but what it was--the voice

of a small bird singing inside, Lord,

how it sang, and kept singing!

how it keeps singing!

in its deep

and miraculous

composure.

This is one of the longest Mary Oliver poems I've ever read.  But saying farewell to someone you care about isn't easy.  It's complicated and can take a long time.  Even when you know that the illness is relentless and end is near, it still turns you into a broken bone.  The fracture may heal, but, when rain or snow comes, you will still feel the ghost of pain.

It is Friday evening, and I'm dead tired.  Recently, I've been thinking a lot about people I've lost--sisters, parents, a brother, friends.  Autumn prompts this kind of reflection in me.  I think it has something to do with the world getting ready for a long winter's nap.  

We are approaching All Saint's Day and All Soul's Day.  I've always felt like the veil between this world and the next is a little thinner this time of year.  The spirits of the dead are nearby, tapping on windows, haunting doorsteps.  Many times this week, I've found myself sitting at my desk, staring out my office window at the church steeple across the street, thinking of my catalogue of lost loved ones.

Don't worry.  I'm not going to get all maudlin in this post, although, as night stretches out its fingers earlier and earlier to snatch the sun out of the heavens, I do tend to become more reflective and, maybe, a little sadder.  But I'm not adding logs to that melancholy fire here.  

This afternoon, I drove by the cemetery where my sister and parents were laid to rest.  As I always do, I said a little prayer for them.  Then I thought of all the other headstones in that necropolis.  Some of those dearly departed have probably been forgotten by the living world, their names not given oxygen for years and years.

So, I'm including my lost loved ones' names in this post, to mark that they existed and were important and loved.  In a Catholic funeral Mass, there's a prayer that's recited near the end of the service:  "Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.  May their souls, and all the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.  Amen."

As you read my list below, please recite a little prayer for my people.  Or, if you knew them, remember their smiles or voices or laughter.  Or just say their names.  Give them breath,  Acknowledge they were here.  And add the names of your dead.  Honor them.  With words.  And memory.

Saint Marty's dead:  Kevin Achatz . . . Sally Achatz . . . Fred Achatz . . . Betty Achatz . . . Rosemarie Achatz . . . Cheryl Hoiem . . . Emmett Hoiem . . . Corinne Hoiem . . . Bruce Hoiem . . . Sally Zanetti . . . Ray Ventre . . . Helen Haskell Remien . . . 

October 19: "The Rabbit," Beautiful Poet Friend, "Ordinary in Rough Draft"

Mary Oliver teaches death a lesson . . . 

The Rabbit

by:  Mary Oliver

Scatterghost,

it can't float away.

And the rain, everybody's brother,

won't help.  And the wind all these days

flying like ten crazy sisters everywhere

can't seem to do a thing.  No one but me,

and my hands like fire,

to lift him to a last burrow.  I wait

days, while the body opens and begins

to boil.  I remember

the leaping in the moonlight, and can't touch it,

wanting it miraculously to heal

and spring up

joyful.  But finally

I do.  And the day after I've shoveled

the earth over, in a field nearby

I find a small bird's nest lined pale

and silvery and the chicks--

are you listening, death?--warm in the rabbit's fur.

This morning, as I usually do at least once a week, I met with a beautiful poet friend to write.  For an hour, we sat across from each other and scribbled in our respective journals.  We both love Mary Oliver--her embrace of the joy and darkness of the universe.  Newborn chicks cradled in the fur of a dead rabbit.

I love when my morning begins with poetry and writing.  It guides my mind to a different place where I recognize the tiny miracles of everyday life.  And that's exactly what happened today.

One of my prompts this a.m. was pretty simple:  write a poem about an "ordinary" day.  

My poet friend and I quickly realized that "ordinary" really doesn't define our lives.  We are both people whose days are a chaotic series of encounters, experiences, and evolutions.  Neither of us really do ordinary often.  So, we struggled with this particular poetic challenge.

Saint Marty came up with something, filled with both joy and darkness.  You be the judge of its ordinariness.

Ordinary in Rough Draft

by:  Martin Achatz

I have to plan for ordinary,

my days usually crowded

with the reach for extraordinary,

sunrises that steer my car

to Lake Superior; mornings

that are filled to the brim 

with forgotten doctor's appointments

or burned toast or lumpy

oatmeal; work days humming

with the kind of urgency

that belongs in emergency

rooms or intensive care units;

bosses who insist the report

needs to be submitted by noon.

Emails.  Deadlines,  Phones

ringing like so many flocks

of seagulls in a frenzy over

spilled French fries.  Then

home, to an evening crammed

with the prep and burn 

for tomorrow's extraordinariness.

A confession:  I don't know 

what ordinary looks like.

Is it a glass of cold milk

and scrambled eggs?  Or

meeting a poet friend for 

some stolen seconds before

the day's chaos descends?  

Or maybe chaos is ordinary.  

Maybe I should write a psalm

for ink in my pen, full charge on my

phone battery.  Maybe ordinary

is that spiderweb outside

the door at work, studded

with diamonds of rain.

It stops me dead for a few

moments to marvel at its

wild, delicate art.

October 18: "At Blackwater Pond," Beautiful Things, Love and Wonder

Mary Oliver and a beautiful thing . . . 

At Blackwater Pond

by:  Mary Oliver

At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled

after a night of rain.

I dip my cupped hands.  I drink

a long time.  It tastes

like stone, leaves, fire.  It falls cold

into my body, waking the bones.  I hear them

deep inside me, whispering

oh what is that beautiful thing

that just happened?

Like Oliver's bones, we are all sometimes shocked by beautiful things that happen to us.

Sometimes, that beautiful thing is an unexpected letter, card, email, or text.  My niece sent me this text right before the awards ceremony on Sunday, where I was named Writer of the Year:

I won't make it tonight to your ceremony, but I am soooo proud of you!  There's no one more deserving than you!

My daughter, the day after I received the award, sent me this message:

just wanted to tell you how proud i am to have you as my father, im so happy to see you be recognized for your work last night as you're the hardest working person i know.  the foundation you set for me in english, poetry, art, and music has allowed me to never be afraid to express myself and always be a creative soul.  i love you sooo much and i'm forever grateful that i somehow got lucky enough to have someone as caring, thoughtful, kind, and supportive as you to be my dad.💓💓

I not ashamed to say that I cried when I got both of these texts.  A lot.  Two beautiful things that fell out of the sky into my hands.  I know that my niece loves me.  I know that my daughter loves me.  But to have my niece say she's proud of me, to have my child say that she's lucky to have me as a father . . . Well, it was better than the award itself.  Pardon my language, but it proved to me that I've done something fucking right in my life.

And tonight, I had two more beautiful things happen:  beautiful readings by two poet friends--Dennis Hinrichsen and Andrew Collard.  It was an hour of absolute joy listening to them read from their new books, Sprawl and Flesh-plastique.  Their poems were moving, astonishing, challenging, and true to the bone.  I was blessed by their words.

So, if you can't tell, Saint Marty is sort of blissed out this evening.  The world contains so much love and wonder and beauty.

October 17: "In Blackwater Woods," Letting Go, Celebrations of Life

Mary Oliver shares everything she has ever learned . . . 

In Blackwater Woods

by:  Marty Oliver

Look, the trees

are turning

their own bodies 

into pillars

of light,

are giving off the rich

fragrance of cinnamon

and fulfillment,

the long tapers

of cattails

are bursting and floating away over

the blue shoulders

of the ponds,

and every pond,

no matter what its

name is, is 

nameless now.

Every year

everything 

I have ever learned

in my lifetime

leads back to this:  the fires

and the black river of loss

whose other side

is salvation,

whose meaning

none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

Oliver lists the three most important things every person on this planet must do:  1) love what is mortal; 2) hold on to that mortal thing as if it's a matter of life and death; and 3) let it go when it's time to let it go.  Of course, one of the he hardest life lessons to learn is the third one.  

Think about it.  I've been a breathing being on this planet for quite some time, and you don't get to be my age without experiencing loss in some form.  Saying "goodbye" is just as important as saying "I love you" or "thank you" or "I'm sorry" or "I accept the Nobel Prize in Literature."  As you get older, you have to say "goodbye" more and more often.  Attrition starts to define your existence.

Of course, goodbyes don't have to be sad affairs.  Goodbyes can be celebrations, as well.  I've been to my fair share of funerals, and I've noticed that the term "funeral" is not in vogue anymore.  Nope.  Most funerals I've attended in the last ten or so years have been called "celebrations of life."  A nice sentiment, but I think that term whitewashes the occasion, caters to the instinct in human beings to avoid or sidestep death.

Death.  Grief.  Loss.  These are all parts of the human experience.  Not particularly pleasant parts, but parts, nonetheless.  If you love something/someone, you will eventually lose that something/someone.  It's inevitable.  And it won't be easy.  It will suck, possibly for a very long time.  Maybe even for the rest of your life.  Grief does not have a finishing line.  You don't just wake up one morning and think, "Okay, I'm over that."  It would be wonderful if it were that simple.

As I said, though, goodbyes can be joyful, as well.  One of my favorite funereal traditions I heard about from a Cajun friend is having a brass band escort the casket to the cemetery while playing "When the Saints Go Marching In."  In that case, the goodbye really does become a celebration of life, full of clapping, singing, and music.  

Letting go.  It's tough.  No getting around it.

If any of Saint Marty's disciples are currently grieving, be consoled by this fact:  even after the darkest of rainstorms, there will always be a rainbow.

October 16: "Tecumseh," Anger Boundless, Good at Heart

Mary Oliver on righteous anger . . . 

Tecumseh

by:  Mary Oliver

I went down not long ago

to the Mad River, under the willows

I knelt and drank from that crumpled flow, call it

what madness you will, there's a sickness

worse than the risk of death and that's

forgetting what we should never forget.

Tecumseh lived here.

The wounds of the past

are ignored, but hang on

like the litter that snags among the yellow branches,

newspapers and plastic bags, after the rains.

Where are the Shawnee now?

Do you know?  Or would you have to 

write to Washington, and even then,

whatever they said,

would you believe it?  Sometimes

I would like to paint my body red and go out into

the glittering snow to die.

His name meant Shooting Star.

From Mad River country north to the border

he gathered the tribes

and armed them one more time.  He vowed

to keep Ohio and it took him

over twenty years to fail.

After the bloody and final fighting, at Thames,

it was over, except

his body could not be found.

It was never found,

and you can do whatever you want with that, say

his people came in the black leaves of the night

and hauled him to a secret grave, or that

he turned into a little boy again, and leaped

into a birch canoe and went

rowing home down the rivers.  Anyway,

this much I'm sure of:  if we ever meet him, we'll know it,

he will still be

so angry.

There is a righteous anger in this poem.  The wounds of the past don't disappear.  As Oliver says, they hang on, persist like plastic bottles or bags, making the world unkind and ugly.  Tecumseh becomes myth--disappearing and transforming--yet he is still defined/identifiable by one thing:  his all-consuming anger.

Holding onto anger is not healthy.  I've learned this through my hundreds of hours in therapy and counseling.  Being angry at an individual doesn't really accomplish anything.  The person who made you angry is probably ignorant of your feelings while you are losing sleep and developing an ulcer.  Anger makes you sick.  

That doesn't mean all anger is bad.  People should get pissed about injustices and inequalities.  We in the United States all benefit from old white men stealing land from Indigenous peoples.  The economy of this country was driven by the slave trade.  U. S. citizens suffer and die because they can't afford decent healthcare or proper medication.  There are Holocaust deniers and white nationalists.  Rich male politicians and Supreme Court Justices who want to control women's health and bodies.  Homophobes who think love is something that can be legislated and controlled.  Islamophobes who blame the world's evils on Muslims.  Xenophobes who blame the world's evils on everyone but themselves.

The list is endless, the anger boundless.

However, I learned a long time ago that you can disagree without being disagreeable.  Another way of saying this:  you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar.  Bombs don't settle disagreements--they simply lead to blood and death.  Screaming and shouting don't settle disagreements, either--they just make your opposition scream and shout louder.  Starting a war is easy.  Building lasting peace, on the other hand, is complicated, if not impossible.  

I always return to a quote from Anne Frank when I fall into anger or darkness:  “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”

If a little Jewish girl hiding in an attic in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam can still hope for peace and tranquility, I think we all can, as well.  Anger can be a catalyst for the worst kinds of human behavior.  It can also be a catalyst for goodness, kindness, understanding, and love.

In spite of everything happening in the world today, Saint Marty still believes that people are really good at heart.  Unless they're Trumpers.  

October 15: "Blackberries," Marquette Art Awards, Writer of the Year

Mary Oliver finds prizes along the road . . . 

Blackberries

by:  Mary Oliver

I come down.

Come down the blacktop from Red Rock.

A hot day.

Off the road in the hacked tangles

blackberries big as thumbs hang shining

in the shade.  And a creek nearby:  a dark

spit through wet stones.  And a pool

like a stonesink if you know

where to climb for it among

the hillside ferns, where the thrush

naps in her nest of sticks and loam.  I

come down from Red Rock, lips streaked

black, fingers purple, throat cool. shirt

full of fernfingers, head full of windy

whistling.  It

takes all day.

It has been a long day. Drove home from Calumet this morning. Didn't see any blackberries along the highway, but autumn colors were in full blaze.

Tonight, I attended the 2023 Marquette Art Awards, where I was presented with the Writer of the Year recognition. It was an inspiring night, full of friends and artists and performers (including a poetry reading from me). Some of my favorite people were in my cheering section.

It's late now, and I'm pretty exhausted. However, I wanted to share something from tonight's awards ceremony.

Below is Saint Marty's acceptance speech and the poem he read this evening . . .

Acceptance Speech:

My story begins on a farm in downstate Michigan, where my father skated through manure, fed chickens, vowed he wouldn’t spend the rest of his life pitching hay. And in a house not far from the St. Clair River and auto factories of Detroit, where my six-year-old mother spoon-fed potato soup to her father dying of stomach cancer.

Of course, beginnings aren’t really beginnings. I stand here tonight on the shoulders of a whole clan of greats, great-greats, great-great-greats who looked across the Atlantic and saw something better, a life of promise in houses, villages, cities, towns built on stolen lands on the backs of stolen people.

I am a plumber’s son from a plumber’s family. In my five-plus decades of breath, I have carried that label as honorific, as badge to my working-class roots, the hard-as-cement hands of my father, brothers, and sisters.

I am a plumber’s son told by two mentors—Drs. Raymond Ventre and Ron Johnson—that I needed to study and write, needed to cast my net further and further out, where shadows of whales swim

I am a plumber’s son who, one afternoon in the office of his Cajun conjurer, writer, teacher, friend, Dr. Beverly Matherne, heard her make this pronouncement like an eleventh commandment: “You are a poet.”

I am a plumber’s son surrounded by a multitude of shades, people, breathing and breathed, who have held my hand, guided me like Virgil through the circles of this poetic life. Helen Haskell Remien, comet of joy, who still burns bright in so many of heaven’s hearts. Janeen Pergrin Rastall, for teaching me to laugh loud and long and hard in order to keep darkness at bay. So many names—B.G., Gala, Ronnie, Christine, Rosalie, Roslyn, Lynn, Gail, Esther, Milt—that to say them all would take an encyclopedia, a Wikipedia of time.

I am a plumber’s son who bows before the great gardeners of art in this city on Superior—Tiina, Amelia, and Tristan.

I am a plumber’s son blessed by a partner who has never asked me to be anything but a poet, by a son and daughter who have been served syllables and words for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and never wanted peanut butter and jelly instead.

I am a plumber’s son whose plumber father, six months before he became moment and memory, came to a poetry reading and introduced himself to a stranger thusly: “I am the poet’s father.”

I am a plumber’s son now reduced to just two syllables, two bites of air, two breaths: “Thank you.”

Poem:

Growth Triptych

by:  Martin Achatz

October 15, 2023

1. The Art of Growth

A coworker carries her granddaughter
around the office, showing off
her dark curls and serious eyes.
I am amazed how much the child
has grown, size her up
like a blue-ribbon squash.
The last time I saw her,
she fit into the fold of my arm,
a mitten of sleep. Now,
in this thick June, she is
all height and weight, a moving
field of sprout and fruit.

My coworker knows the art of growth,
the moisture and heat it needs,
the cycles of sowing and reaping.
With her daughter, she kneads manure
into black earth, thick with cow smell,
watches her granddaughter plow
dirt with her fingers.
I wonder if she is ever astonished
by the size of her roses,
the yellow of her daylilies.
I wonder if she ever listens
to her garden at night,
the way I used to listen to my daughter
stretch and grow in the dark.

2. In the Garden

I can put my fist in the hole
in my sister’s flank, see rib
white against slick muscle.
When she sleeps, her body cries
for healthy blood and skin and scar.
I sit beside her hospital bed, listen
to her breaths, wonder if she dreams
of dog bites, sharp glass,
the thick kiss of a dead love.
The man down the hall moans
“Clara” in the dark,
a two-syllable prayer
for deep winter, pine cones,
cool fingers on his naked back.
My sister’s hand flutters on the sheet.
I touch her wrist, trace the blue veins
under the skin. Her face smooths
like a snowdrift, and I see
the pulse leap in her temple,
nostrils black with air,
eyes vagrant beneath their lids.

Her wound has not healed for two years,
and I joke she has stigmata like Padre Pio,
beg her to touch my head, bless me.
She laughs, crosses the air.
When the priest visits her, my sister says,
“I feel like someone forgot to bury me.”
He anoints her forehead, hands, and feet.
During her next dressing change,
my sister grips the rails of the bed,
bites her lip until it bruises, splits
The nurse examines the discharge,
smells the wound for infection, then leaves.
My sister cradles her stomach, as if afraid
her heart may spill onto the floor.

Pio’s wounds smelled of violets,
the petals of his fingers raising
full-moon hosts to heaven
during mass, roses blooming
on the snow of his bandages.
He bled all day, enough to fill
a chalice to its golden lip,
For five decades, he nursed
the stigmata like fragile orchids
rooted in his body’s soil.
At night, in his cell, he stripped
his dressings, allowed his suffering
to breathe the dark air, nerve endings
sparking in his ragged skin
like fireflies in tall grass.
In the few hours he slept,
his body opened, unfurled
the deep ovule of his pain
until the floor, walls, ceiling
blossomed with his bruised fragrance.

Tonight, my sister rests.
The IV fills her, the way rain fills
a summer garden. She holds
her side, blooms in her bed,
a fresh and open miracle.

3. Genesis

In seven days, what can I
create? If I open my lips,
can I speak something to life—
a charm of hummingbirds, flood
of dolphins, riot of Queen
Anne’s lace in an August
culvert? If I say Let there be
poem, will green shoots
press through soil, rise
against the soles of my feet,
stretch vermillion toward
sun and cloud and blue,
petals singing thanks
to the wild, wild universe?
Did you ever think God
has been revising us
since he first scribbled our names
in the fields of his journal?
Maybe God is Walt Whitman,
adding, subtracting, hoeing,
watering, pruning, harvesting.
Maybe Eden is the borning
breath my daughter suckled,
or the last breath my sister
held in her lungs. Maybe
we’re all apples just waiting
to be plucked and eaten
by someone who wants
to taste how sweet this world
really is.

October 14: "The Roses," 28th Wedding Anniversary, My Wife

I give my wife roses on our anniversary . . . 

The Roses

by:  Mary Oliver

One day in summer

when everything

has already been more than enough

the wild beds start

exploding open along the berm

of the sea; day after day

you sit near them; day after day

the honey keeps on coming

in the red cups and the bees 

like amber drops roll

in the petals; there is no end,

believe me! to the inventions of summer,

to the happiness your body

is willing to bear.

I didn't give my wife much of a 28th anniversary.  I spent most of the day writing scripts and rehearsing for a show I did tonight at the Keweenaw Storytelling Center.  We did have breakfast together, and we did go for a short walk afterward, holding hands and marveling at our union.

Aside from that it was, "All work and no play make Jack a dull boy."

So, I want to take this moment to say that I'm the luckiest person alive.  My spouse is infinitely patient, and her patience is matched only by her beauty.  Yes, we've had some major ups and downs during our time together.  Some of the downs were so down that I truly didn't think our union was going to survive.

Yet, here we are, almost 30 years later, still together and still in love.  I'm not a rich person.  I've tried to be the best husband and father I know how to be.  Haven't always succeeded in that goal.  Yet, my wife has stood by me, and I've stood by her, through all the earthquakes and roses that 30-some years can throw at a couple.

My wife is asleep now after a long day, but I just want to say one more time before midnight comes:  Happy anniversary, my love.  

You make Saint Marty's cup runneth over, every day. 

October 13: "A Meeting," Louise Glück, To Everything

Mary Oliver sees a beautiful woman . . .

A Meeting

by:  Mary Oliver

She steps into the dark swamp

where the long wait ends.

The secret slippery package

drops to the weeds.

She leans her long neck and tongues it

between breaths slack with exhaustion

and after a while it rises and becomes a creature

like her, but much smaller.

So now there are two.  And they walk together

like a dream under the trees.

In early June, at the edge of a field

thick with pink and yellow flowers

I meet them.

I can only stare.

She is the most beautiful woman

I have ever seen.

Her child leaps among the flowers,

the blue of the sky falls over me

like silk, the flowers burn, and I want

to live my life all over again, to begin again,

to be utterly

wild.

Ecclesiastes 3 is one of my favorite Biblical passages:

For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to harvest. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to tear down and a time to build up. A time to cry and a time to laugh. A time to grieve and a time to dance. A time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones. A time to embrace and a time to turn away. A time to search and a time to quit searching. A time to keep and a time to throw away. A time to tear and a time to mend. A time to be quiet and a time to speak. A time to love and a time to hate. A time for war and a time for peace.

I have to believe that Mary Oliver was well-acquainted with these verses.  Tonight's poem is all about a time to be born--the beautiful doe bringing a secret slippery package into the green world.  Her child soon leaps in pink and yellow flowers, and the new mother walks with her under the dream of the trees.  Seeing them, Oliver wants to be reborn as something untamed and untamable.

Of course, if there is a season of birth, there's also a season of death.  On this Friday the 13th, poet Louise Glück died.  I've always thought of Glück as a poetic cousin to Mary Oliver, both women writing in plain, spare language about nature and love and loss and joy and grief.  Glück was 80-years-old and had won just about every award a writer can win, including the Nobel Prize in Literature three years ago in the middle of the pandemic.

Tonight, as I sit in a hotel room in Calumet, Michigan, typing this post, I am still a little shocked by the news of Glück's passing.  People die every day.  I know this.  It's a 100% certainty--we are all going to stop breathing eventually and become fertilizer or dust or compost.  There are some people, however, who seem as ageless as Betty White.  You just expect them to live forever.  Mary Oliver was one of those people for me, and so was Louise Glück.  (Let's not even go near the fact that she only lived for three years after receiving the Nobel--that kind of sucks.)

But it seems appropriate that Glück took her final bow in October--autumn in the United States--when the maples blaze and morning air bites the throat with coming frost.  It is a perfect time to bid farewell.  That doesn't make the farewell any easier, but a poet knows when to end a poem--what image or word to leave in the mind or on the tongue.  And Glück was a hell of a poet.

So, I raise Louise Glück up to all of my faithful disciples this evening.  She made the universe better, more beautiful with her words.

Saint Marty hopes someone says the same thing about him one day.

A poem by Glück:

Vespers

by:  Louise Glück

In your extended absence, you permit me 

use of earth, anticipating 

some return on investment. I must report 

failure in my assignment, principally 

regarding the tomato plants. 

I think I should not be encouraged to grow 

tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold 

the heavy rains, the cold nights that come 

so often here, while other regions get 

twelve weeks of summer. All this 

belongs to you: on the other hand, 

I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots 

like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart 

broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly 

multiplying in the rows. I doubt 

you have a heart, in our understanding of 

that term. You who do not discriminate 

between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence, 

immune to foreshadowing, you may not know 

how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf, 

the red leaves of the maple falling 

even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible 

for these vines.

October 12: "Humpback," Moments of Inspiration, Roof of the Library

Mary Oliver chases some whales . . .

Humpbacks

by:  Mary Oliver

There is, all around us,

this country

of original fire.

You know what I mean.

The sky, after all, stops at nothing, so something

     has to be holding

our bodies

in its rich and timeless stables or else 

we would fly away.

∞

Off Stellwagen

off the Cape,

the humpbacks rise.  Carrying their tonnage

     of barnacles and joy

they leap through the water, they nuzzle back under it

like children

at play.

∞

They sing, too.

And not for any reason

you can't imagine.

∞

Three of them

rise to the surface near the bow of the boat,

then dive

deeply, their huge scarred flukes

tipped to the air.

We wait, not knowing

just where it will happen; suddenly

they smash through the surface, someone begins

shouting for joy and you realize

it is yourself as they surge

upward and you see for the first time

how huge they are, as they breach,

and dive, and breach again

through the shining blue flowers

of the split water and you see them

for some unbelievable

part of a moment against the sky--

like nothing you've ever imagined--

like the myth of the fifth morning galloping

out of darkness, pouring

heavenward, spinning; then

∞

they crash back under those black silks

and we all fall back

together into that wet fire, you

know what I mean.

∞

I know a captain who has seen them

playing with seaweed, swimming

through the green islands, tossing

the slippery branches into the air.

I know a whale that will come to the boat whenever

she can, and nudge it gently along the bow

with her long flipper.

I know several lives worth living.

∞

Listen, whatever it is your try

to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you

like the dreams of your body,

in spirit

longing to fly while the dead-weight bones

toss their dark mane and hurry 

back into the fields of glittering fire

where everything,

even the great whale,

throbs with song.

Oliver witnesses something miraculous in this poem--the humpbacks launching themselves impossibly to the heavens, shedding the gravity of their bodies for a few tiny moments before being pulled back, back into the black silks of the sea.  It's a sight that makes Oliver unconsciously shout for joy as the great whales breach and dive and then breach again.

You can't plan for moments of joy or inspiration.  They just happen.  This morning, after I dropped my son off at school and wife at work, I looked at the sky and saw the possibility of wonder.  A thin ribbon of gold light was just unstitching the clouds on the horizon.  So, I texted one of my best poet friends whom I know for a fact is a wonder-chaser:  "Do you want to watch the sunrise from the roof of the library?  It looks like it's going to be pretty good."

In ten minutes time, we were standing on top of the library, looking out at Lake Superior as the sun transformed the water and clouds into a gift of color and light.  It happened almost suddenly.  One second, everything was gray and gloomy, the next, the world was on fire, as if some great humpback had just breached the sky and scattered gold and pink flames along the curve of the planet.

It was gloriously transcendent.  Just as the whales in Oliver's poem shed their tonnage by leaping from the ocean, I felt myself become lighter as the sky simmered around me.  I almost laughed from the sheer joy of the moment, and I was sharing it with a poet friend who got it.  Who understood my impulse to drop everything just for the possibility of amazement.

So tonight, Saint Marty shares with you, his faithful disciples, a little piece of his humpback experience from this morning.  

The whales were jumping in great gold and orange showers across the sky, their bodies singing psalms of praise.

October 11: "The Fish," Elizabeth Bishop, Returning to the Sea

Mary Oliver goes fishing . . . 

The Fish

by:  Mary Oliver

The first fish

I ever caught

would not lie down

quiet in the pail

but flailed and sucked

at the burning

amazement of the air

and died

in the slow pouring off

of rainbows.  Later

I opened his body and separated

the flesh from the bones

and ate him.  Now the sea

is in me.  I am the fish, the fish

glitters in me; we are

risen, tangled together, certain to fall

back to the sea.  Out of pain,

and pain, and more pain

we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished

by the mystery.

Poet Oliver does poet Elizabeth Bishop one better.  When Bishop writes about her encounter with a fish, she examines the fish, inventories it, wonders at its age and battle scars, and then she lets it go--releases it back to the rainbow of the waters.  Oliver, on the other hand, watches the fish she catches while it flails in the bucket, sucking the killing oxygen, until it dies in "the slow pouring off / of rainbows."  Rainbows again.  Then, Oliver separates the meat from the bone, and she eats, making the fish flesh of her flesh.  A part of herself.

My daughter and son love to fish.  On the other hand, I'm not a fishing person.  I have gone fishing in my youth--I once caught a 28-inch coho salmon with a redworm.  Don't ask me how.  However, my definition of a good time does not involve bait, hooks, or a reel.  But I do find something sacred in Oliver's description of her fish.  In the eating of it.  The mystery of returning to the sea.

In the past, I have written a poem about a fish.  Of course, I wasn't really writing about a scaled and finned creature.  My fish was mental illness and maternal love.  Mystery and evolution.

Fish can represent different things to different writers.  Just like rain can be cleansing and renewing (think baptism) or annihilating (Noah and the Great Flood).  If I were to write another fish poem tonight, I'm sure that fish wouldn't symbolize mental illness or heredity or a mother's affection.  I'm really tired, so the fish would probably come from deeper waters and deeper currents.  I don't want to know what Freud would say about a big fish in a dream.  Apologies to  Sigmund--sometimes a fish is just a fish. 

Saint Marty just needs to take a deep breath and dive in.

October 10: "White Night," Insomnia, Vicious Cycle

Mary Oliver and a muskrat . . . 

White Night

by:  Mary Oliver

All night

     I float 

          in the shallow ponds

               while the moon wanders

burning,

     bone white,

          among the milky stems.

               Once

I saw her hand reach

     to touch the muskrat's

          small sleek head

                and it was lovely, oh,

I don't want to argue anymore

     about all the things

          I thought I could not

               live without!  Soon

the muskrat

     will glide with another

          into their castle

               of weeds, morning

will rise from the east

     tangled and brazen,

          and before that

               difficult

and beautiful

     hurricane of light

          I want to flow out

               across the mother

of all waters,

     I want to lose myself

          on the black

               and silky currents,

yawning,

     gathering,

          the tall lilies

               of sleep.

I've never really been a sound or deep sleeper.  Most nights, like Oliver, I'm awake with the muskrat in the white night under a palm of moonlight.  It isn't that I don't want to sleep.  More like my mind simply won't turn off.  As soon as my head hits the pillow, I think of about a quadrillion tasks left unfinished, and I start obsessing.

As I type these words right now, I'm pretty exhausted.  I find myself pausing, sometimes for several seconds, in between sentences.  My eyes go unfocused, and my mind takes flight.  However, once I publish this post, I will be fully awake and alert, planning out tomorrow's to-do list that I will, inevitably, not finish, either, thereby starting this whole vicious cycle over again.  

If you have never suffered from insomnia, you just won't get what I'm saying tonight.  There is absolutely nothing worse than being awake at 3 a.m., knowing that, in less than three hours, you have to get out of bed and face the hurricane of morning.  You feel completely alone and isolated.  I've had this problem since I was a young man.  Sleep and I are just not on a first-name basis.

That doesn't mean that I don't get tired.  In fact, it's just the opposite--I get tired, just at the wrong times.  Nowadays, I take medicines to help me sleep at night.  Sometimes, they work.  Other times, they slow my mind down just enough for me to be able to yawn, close my eyes, and drift along on the black and silky currents of early morning.  

However, I can tell that this evening is going to be rough.  An hour or so ago, I was exhausted.  All I could think about was stretching out on the couch and letting myself be carried away.  Now, I'm fully awake.  I have a book I could read.  And a poem I need to write.  I could grade some student papers.

Don't tell me to count sheep or drink a glass of warm milk or take a hot shower.  None of these "remedies" work for me.  Instead, I will brush my teeth, pull up Love Actually on Netflix (don't judge me), and just sit in the dark, waiting for sleep to make an appearance.

Emily Dickinson wrote, "Because I could not stop for Death-- / He kindly stopped for me--"

Saint Marty writes, "Because I could not stop for Sleep-- / He kindly sat beside me on the couch and ate all my Cheetos."

October 9: "The Snakes," Chasing Butterflies, Bigfoot

Mary Oliver and the serpents . . .

The Snakes

by:  Mary Oliver

I once saw two snakes,

northern racers,

hurrying through the woods,

their bodies

like two black whips

lifting and dashing forward;

in perfect concert

they held their heads high

and swam forward

on their sleek bellies;

under the trees,

through vines, branches,

over stones,

through fields of flowers,

they traveled

like a matched team

like a dance

like a love affair.

Another poem in keeping with the season--this one about snakes.

Of course, being Mary Oliver, she doesn't simply write about snakes in the spooky, Halloween kind of way.  Her snakes are two black whips swimming forward, dancers having a love affair in the vines and stones and fields.  Oliver is in love with these creatures, as she is with most things in nature.

I find myself tonight sitting on my couch, listening to the rain outside, a steady timpani against the windows.  Almost like a tapping, as if someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.  "'Tis only the rain," I think.  "Only this, and nothing more."

I've spent most of today struggling to remain focused, at work and at home.  That's a tall order for me.  I've been an easily distractible person most of my life. Both of my kids have been diagnosed with ADD, so they must have gotten it from somewhere.  Although I've never officially had ADD added to the list of things wrong with me, I recognize how much of my time on this planet has been spent pursuing sudden passions--chasing butterflies, if you will.  

Yet, there's something wonderful about being swallowed by strong emotions.  I mean, Mary Oliver spent her life chasing snakes and dogs and bears.  A lot of people never experience that kind of passion, and I think that's pretty sad.  Me?  My life has been a series of love affairs with various subjects.

But that's what poets do--they fall easily in love.  Emily Dickinson loved Death, among other things.  Walt Whitman loved America, each blade of grass that touched his naked limbs.  Poe loved ravens and his dead wife, who also happened to be his cousin.  Pick up any collection of poems, and it will be filled with love letters to whatever/whomever the poet is currently sleeping with, living with, and conjugally encountering.

For the last several years, my particular distraction has been Bigfoot.  I've been chasing the big hairy guy for quite a while.  Of course, I've been a lover of all things dark and monstrous all of my life.  I spent most of my Saturday afternoons as a kid and teen watching old Hammer horror movies.  Plenty of blood and nudity to keep my adolescent mind fixated.  Thus, Halloween has been my jam practically since birth; it fights for supremacy in my heart with Christmas.

You may ask if I ever get tired of my monstrous obsessions.  The short answer to that query is "yes, of course."  I am currently trying to finish my Bigfoot manuscript because I'm ready to move on to some other love affair.  I have no idea what the next object of my affection will be, but I can say with certainty that it will certainly be smaller and smell a whole lot better.

However, right now, it is an October night.  Rain is falling.  Bigfoot is prowling.

And Saint Marty isn't ready to let any more snakes or skeletons out of his closet just yet.

October 8: "Skunk Cabbage," Smelling Lurid, Noxious Weed

In the spring, Mary Oliver kneels by some . . . 

Skunk Cabbage

by:  Mary Oliver

And now as the iron rinds over

the ponds start dissolving,

you come, dreaming of ferns and flowers

and new leaves unfolding,

upon the brash

turnip-hearted skunk cabbage

slinging its bunched leaves up

through the chilly mud.

You kneel beside it.  The smell

is lurid and flows out in the most

unabashed way, attracting

into itself a continual spattering

of protein.  Appalling its rough

green caves, and the thought

of the thick root nested below, stubborn

and powerful as instinct!

But these are the woods you love,

where the secret name

of every death is life again--a miracle

wrought surely not of mere turning

but of dense and scalding reenactment.  Not

tenderness, not longing, but daring and brawn

pull down the frozen waterfall, the past.

Ferns, leaves, flowers, the last subtle

refinements, elegant and careful, wait

to rise and flourish.

What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.

It is spring, and Oliver ventures into her beloved woods in search of ferns and flowers and new leaves.  What she finds flourishing in the mud is thick-rooted, smelling lurid, and unabashed.

The best laid plans, however.  Sometimes, you think you're going to find wild blueberries, and all you find are goldenrod and nettles.  I had lots of things I wanted to accomplish this weekend--from writing a new poem to grading student papers.  Needless to say, I didn't get half done with my to-do list.  I ended up kneeling in the mud, smelling the turnip-hearted skunk cabbage.  

I did get lesson-plans done.  Updated my online content for teaching.  Planned out a poetry workshop that I had to cancel due to a power outage this evening.  Edited an episode of a podcast.  Plus, I played keyboard for two church services!  I'm beat.  Exhausted.  I can't really accomplish anything more tonight.

Life isn't always pretty.  In fact, I'd say that skunk cabbage frequently appears instead of roses.  

Tonight, all Saint Marty can smell is that noxious weed.  It's the smell of failure.  Dark, heavy clouds shot through with disappointment.

October 7: "Ghosts," Repeat It, Neverending Story

Mary Oliver is haunted . . . 

Ghosts

by:  Mary Oliver

1.

Have you noticed?

2.

Where so many millions of powerful bawling beasts

lay down on the earth and died

it's hard to tell now

what's bone, and what merely

was once.

The golden eagle, for instance,

has a bit of heaviness in him;

moreover the huge barns

seem ready, sometimes, to ramble off

toward deeper grass.

3.

1805

near the Bitterroot Mountains:

a man named Lewis kneels down

on the prairie watching

a sparrow's nest cleverly concealed in the wild hyssop

and lined with buffalo hair.  The chicks,

not more than a day hatched, lean

quietly into the thick wool as if

content, after all,

to have left the perfect world and fallen,

helpless and blind

into the flowered fields and the perils

of this one.

4.

In the book of the earth it is written:

nothing can die.

In the book of the Sioux it is written:

they have gone away into the earth to hide.

Nothing will coax them out again

but the people dancing.

5.

Said the old-timers:

the tongue

is the sweetest meat.

Passengers shooting from train windows

could hardly miss, they were

that many.

Afterward the carcasses

stank unbelievably, and sang with flies, ribboned

with slopes of white fat,

black ropes of blood--hellhunks

in the prairie heat.

6.

Have you noticed? how the rain

falls soft as the fall

of moccasins.  Have you noticed?

how the immense circles still,

stubbornly, after a hundred years,

mark the grass where the rich droppings

from the roaring bulls

fell in the earth as the herd stood

day after day, moon after moon

in their tribal circle, outwaiting

the packs of yellow-eyed wolves that are also

have you noticed? gone now.

7.

Once only, and then in a dream,

I watched while, secretly

and with the tenderness of any caring woman,

a cow gave birth

to a red calf, tongued him dry and nursed him

in a warm corner

of the clear night

in the fragrant grass

in the wild domains

of the prairie spring, and I asked them,

in my dream I knelt down and asked them

to make room for me.

A wise person once said that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."  I think Mary Oliver had that piece of wisdom in mind when she wrote this poem, which is full of the bones of millions of powerful bawling beasts, singing with flies and ribboned with white fat and black ropes of blood.  Each line, each word is full of great hulking memories.

Every person who makes it to adulthood harbors memories that possess them at times.  Choices they made.  Loved ones they've lost.  Places rattling with the chains of the past.  We all accumulate ghosts as we march through our days.

Today, for me, the ghosts have been very, very near.  Temperatures have fallen nearly 50 degrees over the past three days, and I woke to bone-chilling winds.  There was sun and blue sky and iron clouds and bullets of rain and, just down the street, a rainbow arcing over the roofs and trees.

Basically, it was a typical October morning in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  

I did a poetry reading with several poet friends at my hometown library this afternoon.  My wife took our car to work, so I walked to the reading.  That is where ghosts started appearing.

You see, as a youngster, I used to spend hours and hours at this library, working my way through biographies of famous writers, reading e. e. cummings and Heart's Needle, and devouring all the mythology and paranormal and horror I could get my hands on.  I knew those bookshelves the way I knew which houses in my neighborhood gave out full-size candy bars on Halloween.

So each time I step foot inside that building, I bump into ghosts of myself and my literary friends.  Shades of Holden Caulfield and Santiago, Bigfoot and Martians.  My mother never questioned my reading selections, even when I returned home with William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist tucked under my arm.  I read anything and everything, frequently staying up all night to do so.

This evening, as I sit writing this post, I'm still surrounded by today's ghosts. living and dead, literary and real.  Ahab and Zaphod Beeblebrox.  Earlier incarnations of myself and parents and brothers and sisters.  They all swirl around me like tendrils of fog.

One of my favorite books as a kid was The Neverending Story by Michael Ende.  I found comfort in a narrative that had a life of its own, that continued even after you stopped reading.  Maybe that's what we all are--ghosts in a story that never reaches "The End" or "and they lived happily ever after."

Maybe Saint Marty is the ghost of that little boy, sitting on the living room couch with his stack of library books, waiting for the next chapter to unfold in his own neverending story.