September 15: "Boy Shooting at a Statue," Unlimited Lives, Snapping Turtle

I think anyone can be a poet, just like anyone can be a computer programmer or firefighter or teacher.  We're only limited by our interests and passions.

When I was younger, I wanted to be Steven Spielberg, surround myself with whip-toting archeologists and heart-glowing extraterrestrials.  (I knew these things weren't real.  I just loved Spielberg's storytelling, how he could hold in a thrall a couple hundred people in a movie theater.)  When I was a little older, I wanted to be Stephen King, scaring the shit out of million of people with my words.

That's what kids do.  They imagine different lives for themselves--better, exciting, unlimited lives.

Billy Collins observes a young boy playing a game . . . 

Boy Shooting at a Statue

by: Billy Collins

It was late afternoon,
the beginning of winter, a light snow,
and I was the only one in the small park

to witness the lone boy running
in circles around the base of a bronze statue.
I could not read the carved name

of the statesman who loomed above,
one hand on his cold hip,
but as the boy ran, head down,

he would point a finger at the statue
and pull an imaginary trigger
imitating the sounds of rapid gunfire.

Evening thickened, the mercury sank,
but the boy kept running in the circle
of his footprints in the snow

shooting blindly into the air.
History will never find a way to end,
I thought, as I left the park by the north gate

and walked slowly home
returning to the station of my desk
where the sheets of paper I wrote on

were like pieces of glass
through which I could see
hundreds of dark birds circling in the sky below.

The boy in this poem may be imagining that he's a cowboy or soldier or frontiersman.  I don't think he's pretending to be a poet.  That job belongs to Collins, who walks home, sits at his desk, and begins to write.

Believe it or not, from a pretty young age, I abandoned ideas of being launched into outer space or saving a baby from a burning building or sitting in the Oval Office.  Of course, when I told my mom that I wanted to be a writer, she supported my ambition, but also encouraged me to get a degree in computer programming for something to fall back on.

Thank goodness, I haven't had to fall back.  Yet.  

Yes, I'm a published writer.  That was my dream.  Still is.  I'm sort of like a snapping turtle--I latched onto the idea and never let go.  This life may not have brought me a ton of money, but it has brought me a ton of happiness. 

Saint Marty couldn't have asked for more than that.  

September 14: "The Lanyard," Summer Camp, "A Bigfoot Bestiary and Other Wonders"

I never went to a summer camp.  My parents talked about sending me to a diabetes camp and a Catholic camp and a poetry deprogramming camp.  (Okay, I made that last one up.)  However, I effectively dodged all of those bullets in my youth.

I don't feel in any way deprived.  In order to experience deprivation, you need to know what you've missed.  I grew up happy and fulfilled without ever stepping foot in a mouse-infested cabin.  Sure, I regularly see a therapist, but that has little to do with my severe lack of summer camping when I was young.

Billy Collins writes about his summer camp days . . . 

The Lanyard

by: Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

Since I never had the summer camp experience, I never had the opportunity to make my mother a lanyard or diorama of the Last Supper made of popsicle sticks or rock painted with van Gogh's The Starry Night.  I don't think she minded.  She knew my tastes and temperaments weren't of the swimming-in-a-leech-infested-lake variety.

But she knew I loved poetry, and she encouraged me in this endeavor quite a bit.  She was in the front row when I defended my theses for my MA and MFA.  She attended most of my poetry readings prior to her Alzheimer's diagnosis.  When I was named U.P. Poet Laureate for the first time, we went out to dinner at Red Lobster together.  While I wasn't a typical son, I know my mother was always proud of my creative accomplishments.

And now I have another creative accomplishment.  It's the lanyard I never made for my mom.  You see, I've been working on a book of poems about Bigfoot for over 20 years now.  It's been both blessing and curse.  I literally never thought I was going to be done with it.  Mom even heard some of my Bigfoot poems before she passed and loved them.

Here it is:  I can finally announce that my poetry collection A Bigfoot Bestiary and Other Wonders will be released on October 1st.  The Kindle version comes out September 28.  That's right, I said Kindle.  Soon to follow will be an Audible version, with your favorite saint reading the poems.  And I'm over-the-moon and completely humbled at the same time.

You see, I wrote this collection simply because it was a book I wanted to read.  I never thought it would have appeal to many other people outside my immediate family.  Yet, here I am, getting ready to plan a book tour.  Life really is strange.

My mom would have loved this book, I think, and not because I wrote it.  The poems in it would have made her laugh.  A lot.  They may have even choked her up a little bit.  (She was never much for crying.)  Above all, she would have been proud of her son, the poet, even if he never made her a lanyard at summer camp.

Saint Marty hopes y'all will consider ordering a copy of his new book from Modern History Press:

Paperback:  https://www.lhpress.com/store/A-Bigfoot-Bestiary-and-Other-Wonders-p695417501

Kindle:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DH2Y8T2H?ref_=pe_93986420_775043100

September 13: "Building with Its Face Blown Off," Aunt Marian, Joy and Grief

When looking on a scene of devastation--say a car accident or burned building--I always find myself meditating on the victims and their lives.  How they probably woke up in the morning, just like me, thinking it was going to be a normal day.  Maybe they had oatmeal for breakfast and were planning on returning some books to the library on their way home from work.  Perhaps they made dinner plans with some friends.  Ordinary, boring, everyday stuff.

Until it's not.

Billy Collins writes about heartbreak and loss . . .

Building with Its Face Blown Off

by: Billy Collins

How suddenly the private
is revealed in a bombed-out city,
how the blue and white striped wallpaper

of a second story bedroom is now
exposed to the lightly falling snow
as if the room had answered the explosion

wearing only its striped pajamas.
Some neighbors and soldiers
poke around in the rubble below

and stare up at the hanging staircase,
the portrait of a grandfather,
a door dangling from a single hinge.

And the bathroom looks almost embarrassed
by its uncovered ochre walls,
the twisted mess of its plumbing,

the sink sinking to its knees,
the ripped shower curtain,
the torn goldfish trailing bubbles.

It’s like a dollhouse view
as if a child on its knees could reach in
and pick up the bureau, straighten a picture.

Or it might be a room on a stage
in a play with no characters,
no dialogue or audience,

no beginning, middle and end-
just the broken furniture in the street,
a shoe among the cinder blocks,

a light snow still falling
on a distant steeple, and people
crossing a bridge that still stands.

And beyond that- crows in a tree,
the statue of a leader on a horse,
and clouds that look like smoke,

and even farther on, in another country
on a blanket under a shade tree,
a man pouring wine into two glasses

and a woman sliding out
the wooden pegs of a wicker hamper
filled with bread, cheese, and several kinds of olives.

Billy Collins captures the two sides of tragedy pretty well in this poem.  While he's anatomizing the site of the bombed-out building, a man and woman in another country are sitting down for a romantic picnic.  Life just goes on.

My day was pretty normal.  I worked at the library, worked on my Bigfoot manuscript some, and picked up Border Grill for dinner on the way home.  My wife and I watched an episode of The Crown.  As I was leaving the house to take my puppy for a walk, I got a text from my sister, informing me that our Aunt Marian, my mother's youngest sister, had just died.

I can't say that I was shocked by the news.  A little over a week ago, she suffered a stroke, and then, while she was in the hospital for treatment, the doctors discovered that her body was full of metastatic cancer.  There was really nothing that could be done for her.

Suddenly, my boring evening became a building with its face blown off, if you get my meaning.  For the last few hours, all I've been thinking about is my aunt and what a wonderful, loving person she was.  One of my most vivid memories of her is from a New Year's Eve party at my parents' house, all of us sitting around the dining room table, playing board games into the wee hours of January 1st.  And then I thought of her at home this evening, in bed, breathing those agonal breaths.

Poet Mary Oliver once wrote this:

We shake with joy, we shake with grief.

What a time they have, these two

housed as they are in the same body.

Tonight, Saint Marty is shaking with joy and grief, giving thanks for his Aunt Marian, mourning her loss.

September 12: "Flock," Community of Poets, Nandi Comer

I think everyone needs to feel like they are part of a group.  We all want to belong, be a part of something bigger than ourselves.  That's why we gather friends around us in school and why we attend church.  We go to movie theaters so that we can laugh or scream or clap together for a movie.  I write this blog for my virtual disciples.  My poetic posse.    

Billy Collins writes about a community of sacrificial lambs . . . 

Flock

by: Billy Collins

               It has been calculated that each copy of

               the Gutenburg Bible . . . required the

               skins of 300 sheep.

               ---from an article on printing

I can see them squeezed into the holding pen
behind the stone building
where the printing press is housed,

all of them squirming around
to find a little room
and looking so much alike

it would be nearly impossible
to count them,
and there is no telling

which one will carry the news
that the Lord is a shepherd,
one of the few things they already know.

I spent a good portion of this afternoon and evening surrounded by poets and poetry.  At the library, I hosted an open mic and got to see some people I hadn't seen in a while.  Heard some great readings.  Read a poem in honor of my late brother, Kevin, whose birthday was today.

Then I drove over to the university to listen to a discussion about inclusion in poetry.  The panelists were Nandi Comer, the current Michigan Poet Laureate, and Beverly Matherne, the current U.P. Poet Laureate.  It was a great conversation about the power of words to unite disparate groups of individuals.

I really do believe that one of the jobs of a poet is to provide connection and understanding.  We transform the personal into the universal.  When I sit down to write a poem, I always start with my own experiences.  I try to capture what it felt like to be me when I was sitting in the hospital room while my sister was dying.  Or when I'm mowing my lawn on a Saturday morning.  Or when I'm eating pizza with my daughter.  You get the idea.  And then I hold my hand out to readers, invite them to join me in my grief or exhaustion or hunger or love.  Because, regardless of what a certain orange-complexioned politician says, we're all more alike than different.

Saint Marty came home tonight with his poetic cup overflowing.  And a couple new books.

September 11: "The Names," Love, "Godspeed"

I remember the morning.  Watching the news reports from the Twin Towers.  Seeing the second plane plow into the second Tower.  The Pentagon.  Shanksville.  And I remember going into a classroom at the university that afternoon, staring into the faces of young people who knew that their world had just changed forever.  

When I got home that evening, I picked up my nine-month-old daughter and hugged her.  Hard.

Billy Collins' poem for the victims of 9/11 . . . 

The Names

by: Billy Collins

Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.
A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,
And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,
I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,
Then Baxter and Calabro,
Davis and Eberling, names falling into place
As droplets fell through the dark.
Names printed on the ceiling of the night.
Names slipping around a watery bend.
Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.

In the morning, I walked out barefoot
Among thousands of flowers
Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,
And each had a name --
Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal
Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.

Names written in the air
And stitched into the cloth of the day.
A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.
Monogram on a torn shirt,
I see you spelled out on storefront windows
And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.
I say the syllables as I turn a corner --
Kelly and Lee,
Medina, Nardella, and O'Connor.

When I peer into the woods,
I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden
As in a puzzle concocted for children.
Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,
Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,
Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.

Names written in the pale sky.
Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.
Names silent in stone
Or cried out behind a door.
Names blown over the earth and out to sea.

In the evening -- weakening light, the last swallows.
A boy on a lake lifts his oars.
A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,
And the names are outlined on the rose clouds --
Vanacore and Wallace,
(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)
Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.

Names etched on the head of a pin.
One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.
A blue name needled into the skin.
Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,
The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.
Alphabet of names in a green field.
Names in the small tracks of birds.
Names lifted from a hat
Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.
Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

I'm not going talk any more about my memories of 9/11.  Everyone of a certain age has memories like mine about that terrible day.  Memories full of shock, anger, and grief.  

Tonight, I hold onto the love I feel for the people in my life.  If there was one thing that I learned that September day 23 years ago, it's this:  never to take for granted my family and friends.  At the end of my life, it's not going to matter how much money I have, how many books I've written, or how famous I am.  What is going to matter is how much I've loved and how much I was loved.  

That's Saint Marty's wish for you all this evening--love.

Godspeed

by: Martin Achatz

I write these words over two weeks
past the time I last spoke with you,
when you called me from your bed,
said in a voice so weak it sounded
like dandelion seeds in August,
“Always,” letting me know this would be
our last time together, that you were
done with this stupid blue marble
floating in this ever-expanding
universe, wanted to spread your arms
and soar. I write these words two
days after we all gathered to say
goodbye, Godspeed, thanks
in the rain, where table napkins
with daisies on them melted
into a puddle of beached jellyfish.
And I write these words twenty-
one years and one day after
the planes hit the Towers
and people dialed their husbands,
wives, sisters, brothers, children,
lovers, friends to say one more time
“I love you” and “I will always
be there.” Yesterday, I saw
the picture of a man who leapt
from a window in Tower One,
him diving down, arms glued
to his legs. I hope that he felt
like an eagle or kite or seraphim
as he sailed and spun. Hope
that the wind in his face reminded
him of that day as a kid
when his dad pushed him
on the playground
swing so high he thought
he would keep rising, rising
at the speed of God.

September 10: "In the Evening," Need Tos, Loserhood

Another day is coming to a close.  Quietly.

I spent most of today doing computer work.  Not exciting stuff, but necessary.  I got what I think are the last edits of my Bigfoot manuscript done.  I'm hoping to have news I can announce soon from the publisher.  I also tied up some details on a few other projects and started planning some new events.

Now, sitting on my couch, watching Kamala Harris deal with Donald Trump's exaggerations and lies, I'm ready to draw the curtain on today.

Billy Collins relaxes in the evening . . . 

In the Evening

by: Billy Collins

The heads of roses begin to droop.

The bee who has been hauling her gold

all day finds a hexagon in which to rest.

In the sky, traces of clouds,

the last few darting birds,

watercolors on the horizon.

The white car sits facing a wall.

The horse in the field is asleep on its feet.

I light a candle on the wood table.

I take another sip of wine.

I pick up an onion and a knife.

And the past and the future?

Nothing but an only child with two different masks.

Sometimes, as the sun is going down, I take inventory of what I've accomplished during the day.  I'm a list maker.  Every morning, I sit down and meditate on need tos, like tos, and hope tos.  I need to finish this project.  I'd like to get a start on that project.  I hope to plan out those projects.

In the gloaming of dusk, I usually find myself assessing.  No hope to planned.  No like to started.  Only half of my need tos completed.  And, I feel like a failure.  I've had people tell me to narrow the scope of my lists.  One coworker told me to put only three things on my list every morning.  By doing that, this person said, I can avoid the feeling of abject loserhood.  

Today, there were nine things on my to do list, including all the need, like, and hope tos.  I was able to check off almost every item.  After I'm done typing this post, I will have completed everything.  Plus, I get to watch the Felon in Chief be humiliated.

Saint Marty counts this day as a win.

September 9: "The Long Day," Recuperating, Workaholic Habits

It has been a long day.  But Mondays usually are.

I did library stuff, taught film at the university, did more library stuff, and went over my Bigfoot manuscript one last time, looking typos and misplaced commas and clunky passages.  I just finished that process.  It's a little past 10 p.m. now, and my body is now officially telling me it has been a long day.

Billy Collins writes about his long day . . . 

The Long Day

by: Billy Collins

In the morning I ate a banana
like a young ape
and worked on a poem called “Nocturne.”

In the afternoon I opened the mail
with a short kitchen knife,
and when dusk began to fall

I took off my clothes,
put on “Sweetheart of the Rodeo”
and soaked in a claw-footed bathtub.

I closed my eyes and thought
about the alphabet,
the letters filing out of the halls of kindergarten

to become literature.
If the British call z zed,
I wondered, why not call b bed and d dead?

And why does z, which looks like
the fastest letter, come at the very end?
unless they are all moving east

when we are facing north in our chairs.
It was then that I heard
a clap of thunder and the dog’s bark.

and the claw-footed bathtub
took one step forward,
or was it backward

I had to ask
as I turned
to reach for a faraway towel.

I am still recuperating from the virus I caught last week.  My nose continues running, and, every once in a while, I experience a coughing fit that would have landed me in a tuberculosis sanatorium a hundred years ago.  I'm staring at my laptop screen right now through a veil of teary water, another lovely symptom.

Tomorrow promises to be even longer.  I have a library program in the evening, so I won't be getting home much before 9 p.m., just in time for the big showdown between Kamala Harris and the felon.  I really love the work I do, but my workaholic habits are catching up with me.  In the next few days, I have a feeling I'm going to crash, take to my bed, and sleep for about 12 or 13 hours.  I've been through this cycle more than once.

So, forgive Saint Marty if he doesn't wax philosophic tonight.  His store of wisdom is a little dry, and his head is full of mucous. 

September 8: "House," Home, "You Motherfucker"

In my adult life, I've lived in exactly six different houses/apartments.

I sometimes wonder about the difference between a house and a home.  Friends and relatives have let me stay at their houses when I've traveled.  I just spent a weekend in Calumet, staying at a nice hotel with a swimming pool. hot tub, sauna, and continental breakfast.  And I know that, if needed, any number of people would open their houses to me and my family.

But there is a difference between a house and a home.

Billy Collins writes about his house . . .

House

by: Billy Collins

I lie in a bedroom of a house
that was built in 1862, we were told—
the two windows still facing east
into the bright daily reveille of the sun.

The early birds are chirping,
and I think of those who have slept here before,
the family we bought the house from—
the five Critchlows—

and the engineer they told us about
who lived here alone before them,
the one who built onto the back
of the house a large glassy room with wood beams.

I have an old photograph of the house
in black and white, a few small trees,
and a curved dirt driveway,
but I do not know who lived here then.

So I go back to the Civil War
and to the farmer who built the house
and the rough stone walls
that encompass the house and run up into the woods,

he who mounted his thin wife in this room,
while the war raged to the south,
with the strength of a dairyman
or with the tenderness of a dairyman

or with both, alternating back and forth
so as to give his wife much pleasure
and to call down a son to earth
to take over the cows and the farm

when he no longer had the strength
after all the days and nights of toil and prayer—
the sun breaking over the same horizon
into these same windows,

lighting the same bed-space where I lie
having nothing to farm, and no son,
the dead farmer and his dead wife for company,
feeling better and worse by turns.

I know just a little of the history of my house.  It was built over 100 years ago, and it has seen a couple additions.  The original part of the house consisted of the dining room, living room, two bedrooms, and attic.  When indoor plumbing and electricity became a thing, a kitchen and bathroom were added.  We bought the house from my sister-in-law's in-laws. This weekend, I found out that one of the original owners portrayed a corpse in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder.

But none of those details make a house a home.  A home is defined by the people in it, I think.  When I look back on my childhood home, I don't recall the kitchen or dining room or bedrooms.  I remember my siblings, parents, and grandmother.  They're the ones that made that two-story building into a home.

I've been in my current house now for around 25 years.  We've remodeled the attic into a bedroom.  Put in a new furnace recently.  Painted the dining and living rooms.  However, for me, home is my wife and son and daughter.  I'm typing this post in the room that my daughter slept in as a child.  My son is upstairs, playing online video games, swearing like a Marine drill sergeant.  My wife just went to bed in the room that used to be the nursery.  Every square inch of this place is filled with memories of my little family, good and bad, joyful and sorrowful.

And that is home for Saint Marty.

You Motherfucker

by: Martin Achatz

My son says it to his friends

like an endearment--You motherfucker--

full of the kind of admiration

Queen Isabella had for Columbus

when he returned from the new world

after seeding it with smallpox, or maybe 

the true wonder Pope Sixtus IV expressed

when Michelangelo brought him

into the completed Sistine Chapel

for the first time, Sixtus craning his face 

heavenward, crossing himself with palsied 

hand, muttering to the painter in Latin,

You motherfucker.

Photo courtesy of Abbigail Berry

September 7: "Statues in the Park," Long Day, Creatives

It is the end of a long day.

I just got back to my hotel room after performing in a show in Calumet.  I've been doing The Red Jacket Jamboree for almost eight years now.  Most of the people connected with the RJJ are like family to me.  I love being around musicians and performers and writers and creatives.  It's my jam.  Truly.

I'm still feeling punky.  My voice is shot at the moment.  Just had a sneezing fit and empties my head of mucous.  (I know, I know.  You don't read this blog to hear about my bodily fluids.)  My energy reserves are running on empty at the moment.  I need some rest.

I got a text this morning from my oldest sister this morning.  She traveled to Detroit yesterday to help care for my aunt who is in hospice care.  From what my sister said, it doesn't sound like my aunt has any fight left in her.

Billy Collins contemplates mortality . . . 

Statues in the Park

by: Billy Collins

I thought of you today
when I stopped before an equestrian statue
in the middle of a public square,

you who had once instructed me
in the code of these noble poses.

A horse rearing up with two legs raised,
you told me, meant the rider had died in battle.

If only one leg was lifted,
the man had elsewhere succumbed to his wounds;

and if four legs were touching the ground,
as they were in this case-
bronze hooves affixed to a stone base-
it meant that the man on the horse,

this one staring intently
over the closed movie theater across the street,
had died of a cause other than war.

In the shadow of the statue,
I wondered about the others
who had simply walked through life
without a horse, a saddle, or a sword-

pedestrians who could no longer
place one foot in front of the other.

I pictured statues of the sickly
recumbent on their cold stone beds,
the suicides toeing the marble edge,

statues of accident victims covering their eyes,
the murdered covering their wounds,
the drowned silently treading the air.

And there was I,
up on a rosy-gray block of granite
near a cluster of shade trees in the local park,
my name and dates pressed into a plaque,

down on my knees, eyes lifted,
praying to the passing clouds,
forever begging for just one more day.

It's an interesting idea, isn't it?  Everyone getting a statue that somehow symbolically represents their demise.  Right now, I'm exhausted.  If I die tonight, my statue would be me standing in front of a mic, script in hand, gazing upward as I recite a poem straight into the eardrum of God.

I have a really good life, filled with a beautiful wife, amazing kids, jobs that fuel my creative spirit, and some pretty cool friends.  I was reminded of that this weekend, over and over.  My cool RJJ friends are currently having some drinks at a local bar.

Saint Marty is saying two prayers of thanks tonight:

1. For the wonderful life of his aunt, who loved her family fiercely.
2. For the acceptance and love of his friends, who let him play in all the reindeer games.

September 6: "Monday," Flattened, Calumet

First things first:  I do not feel quite so flattened today.  My nose isn't running as much.  My head doesn't feel like an overinflated tire.  I don't think I have a fever anymore, and my cough is present but not quite so front page news.  It's tucked in the classifieds now.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm on the mend, just in time for a very busy weekend.

Billy Collins talks about the antithesis of Friday . . . 

Monday

by: Billy Collins

The birds are in their trees,
the toast is in the toaster,
and the poets are at their windows.

They are at their windows
in every section of the tangerine of earth–
the Chinese poets looking up at the moon,
the American poets gazing out
at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise.

The clerks are at their desks,
the miners are down in their mines,
and the poets are looking out their windows
maybe with a cigarette, a cup of tea,
and maybe a flannel shirt or bathrobe is involved.

The proofreaders are playing the ping-pong
game of proofreading,
glancing back and forth from page to page,
the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes,
and the poets are at their windows
because it is their job for which
they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.

Which window it hardly seems to matter
though many have a favorite,
for there is always something to see–
a bird grasping a thin branch,
the headlight of a taxi rounding a corner,
those two boys in wool caps angling across the street.

The fishermen bob in their boats,
the linemen climb their round poles,
the barbers wait by their mirrors and chairs,
and the poets continue to stare at the cracked birdbath
or a limb knocked down by the wind.

By now, it should go without saying
that what the oven is to the baker
and the berry-stained blouse to the dry cleaner,
so the window is to the poet.

Just think–
before the invention of the window,
the poets would have had to put on a jacket
and a winter hat to go outside
or remain indoors with only a wall to stare at.

And when I say a wall,
I do not mean a wall with striped wallpaper
and a sketch of a cow in a frame.

I mean a cold wall of fieldstones,
the wall of the medieval sonnet,
the original woman’s heart of stone,
the stone caught in the throat of her poet-lover.

Currently, I'm sitting in a hotel room in Calumet, Michigan.  I have the heat blasting, and Duke Ellington is swinging in my headphones.  I'm going to be performing in a show tomorrow night--The Read Jacket Jamboree.  My voice has been coming and going most of the day.  Right now, it's gone.

And I'm doing just what the poet in Collins' poem is doing:  I'm at my window.  The parking lot is dark, dark, dark.  There's no moon visible.  The only illumination is a streetlight creating a bright pool on the asphalt.  

I need to get to sleep.  It's going to be a busy day of writing and rehearsing and performing tomorrow.  By this time tomorrow night, I will be completely exhausted.  Or dead.  

If Saint Marty does die, please have Wendell Berry read "The Peace of Wild Things" at his funeral.  

September 5: "Poetry," Illness, Reality Check

It has been a day of illness for me.  At first, I thought I was suffering from allergies--runny nose, cough, blocked ears.  As the day and my symptoms progressed (fever, aches, more mucous than Slimer from Ghostbusters), I surrounded myself with an Appalachian range of used Kleenexes and tissues.  My eyes are gushing, and my throat stings.

Before you ask, I did test for COVID.  Twice.  Both tests came back negative.  So, I can't even claim that distinction.  Basically, I just have a very nasty cold.  Annoyingly ordinary.  Nothing to write home or a poem about.  

Billy Collins tries to define poetry . . . 

Poetry

by: Billy Collins

Call it a field where the animals

who were forgotten by the Ark

come to graze under the evening clouds.

Or a cistern where the rain that fell

before history trickles over a concrete lip.

However you see it,

this is no place to set up

the three-legged easel of realism

or make a reader climb

over the many fences of a plot.

Let the portly novelist

with his noisy typewriter

describe the city where Francine was born,

how Albert read the paper on the train,

how curtains were blowing in the bedroom.

Let the playwright with her torn cardigan

and a dog curled on the rug

move the characters

from the wings to the stage

to face the many-eyed darkness of the house.

Poetry is no place for that.

We have enough to do

complaining about the price of tobacco,

passing the dripping ladle,

and singing songs to a bird in a cage.

We are busy doing nothing--

and all we need for that is an afternoon,

a rowboat under a blue sky,

and maybe a man fishing from a stone bridge,

or better still, nobody on that bridge at all.

I couldn't even be a poet tonight, even though Collins says that poets are "busy doing nothing."  I didn't even have the energy to do nothing.  I was supposed to lead an online poetry workshop this evening.  After debating with myself for close to an hour, I came to the conclusion that I would have looked like extra from The Walking Dead if I got on Zoom and tried to write with anyone.  

So I simply grabbed a pillow and blanket and fell asleep on the couch.  Every once in a while, I would climb to the surface of consciousness long enough to take a drink of water or blow my nose.

Eventually, I woke up and decided to type this post.  Now that I'm done, I'm ready to collapse.  Literally.  I think these last few weeks of little sleep and lots of work have caught up with me.  My body is giving me a reality check.  

Here's the reality:  Saint Marty is exhausted.

September 4: "Surprise," First Day of School, New Routine

I don't like surprises.  Never have.

I always go into a classroom with a lesson plan; start my days prioritizing tasks; type up itineraries for trips; create lists and lists in my planner so nothing is overlooked or forgotten.

If I'm ever taken by surprise, I've failed in some way.

But Billy Collins has a few surprises up his sleeve . . .

Surprise

by: Billy Collins

This--
according to the voice on the radio,
the host of a classical music program no less--
this is the birthday of Vivaldi.

He would be 325 years old today--

quite bent over, I would imagine,
and not able to see much through his watery eyes.

Surely, he would be deaf by now,
the clothes flaking off him,
hair pitiably sparse.

But we would throw a party for him anyway,
a surprise party where everyone
would hide behind the furniture to listen

for the tap of his cane on the pavement
and the sound of his dry, persistent cough.

There were no surprises for me today.  My son was feeling much better and went to school.  The only thing that caught me off guard was how easy it was to get him to pose for a first-day-of-school photo.  It helped that he was holding his puppy.

When I picked my son up this afternoon, he was fully back into school mode.  Laughing and joking with his friends.  Jumping in the car and grunting at me when I asked how his first day was.  You know, normal, 15-year-old teenage boy behavior.

I'm also trying to settle into my new routine of school and work.  I really should be used to this shift.  I've been doing it for over 30 years now.  Every three or so months, everything changes--summer into autumn into winter into spring.  

But, no surprises today, aside from the fact that I'm coming down with a really nasty cold.

Saint Marty has a dry, persistent cough right now.

September 3: "Christmas Sparrow," First Day of School, Puking Son

Tonight's post was supposed to be about my son's first day as a high school junior.  I had it all planned out, picture and everything.

Life or God had another plan.  At 5:45 a.m., my son came into my bedroom to tell me he'd just thrown up.  Ten minutes later, he threw up again in the kitchen sink.  Needless to say, he spent his first day of school at home, alternately hugging a pillow and a bucket.  

Billy Collins gets woken up by a sparrow . . . 

Christmas Sparrow

by: Billy Collins

The first thing I heard this morning
was a rapid flapping sound, soft, insistent—

wings against glass as it turned out
downstairs when I saw the small bird
rioting in the frame of a high window,
trying to hurl itself through
the enigma of glass into the spacious light.

Then a noise in the throat of the cat
who was hunkered on the rug
told me how the bird had gotten inside,
carried in the cold night
through the flap of a basement door,
and later released from the soft grip of teeth.

On a chair, I trapped its pulsations
in a shirt and got it to the door,
so weightless it seemed
to have vanished into the nest of cloth.

But outside, when I uncupped my hands,
it burst into its element,
dipping over the dormant garden
in a spasm of wingbeats
then disappeared over a row of tall hemlocks.

For the rest of the day,
I could feel its wild thrumming
against my palms as I wondered about
the hours it must have spent
pent in the shadows of that room,
hidden in the spiky branches
of our decorated tree, breathing there
among the metallic angels, ceramic apples, stars of yarn,
its eyes open, like mine as I lie in bed tonight
picturing this rare, lucky sparrow
tucked into a holly bush now,
a light snow tumbling through the windless dark.

I've loved this poem for many years.  Collins somehow manages to write about Christmas without any sentimentality or nostalgia.  Yet, there's a sense of peace and wonder at the end of it, that "rare, lucky sparrow" perched in a holly bush as snow tumbles down from the heavens.  I'm almost tempted to say "amen" after reading it.

It's difficult writing about certain topics without becoming syrupy and maudlin.  Christmas.  Love.  Puppies.  Your kids.  How do I write about my son without resorting to hyperboles of parental adoration?  It's easy to pluck cheap heartstring moments.

So, I will tell you that I was frustrated with this morning's little monkey wrench.  Before my son vomited the second time, I was actually thinking he was just trying to get one more day of summer vacation.  That's Bad Parenting 101.  Of course, I love my son, but I felt the ghost of my father taking possession of me at one point, these words sitting on my tongue:  "You know, I never missed school.  I had to be bleeding out of every orifice before your grandmother would let me stay home sick."

I didn't say that.  Instead, I gave him a bucket.  Felt his forehead (it was hot).  Told him to go back to bed.  Before I left for work, I reminded him to drink water during the day to stay hydrated.  I sort of felt like Billy Collins capturing that sparrow in a shirt and releasing it into the waiting hemlocks.

My son is feeling better.  He told me he's going to school tomorrow morning.  I went for a walk with my wife and puppy after dinner tonight.  The sun was a brilliant gold cataract in an orange sky.  It stopped me dead in my tracks for a moment with its beauty.  

Saint Marty needed that reminder:  God's eye is on the sparrow, and the sunset, and a puking 15-year-old boy.

September 2: "Elk River Falls," Labor Day, Waterfall

I'm assuming a lot of you, my faithful disciples, have visited a waterfall at some point in your lives.  You know the sound of crashing water and the touch of mist on your skin.  I've always found the experience of being near a waterfall frightening and a little mystical.

Billy Collins chases waterfalls . . . 

Elk River Falls

by: Billy Collins

is where the Elk River falls

from a rocky and considerable height,
turning pale with trepidation at the lip
(it seemed from where I stood below)
before it unbuckles from itself
and plummets, shredded, through the air
into the shadows of a frigid pool,
so calm around the edges, a place
for water to recover from the shock
of falling apart and coming back together
before it picks up its song again,
goes sliding around some massive rocks
and past some islands overgrown with weeds
then flattens out, slips around a bend,
and continues on its winding course,
according to this camper’s guide,
then joins the Clearwater at its northern fork
which leads it all to the distant sea
where this and every other stream
mistakes the monster for itself,
sings its name one final time
then feels the sudden sting of salt.

I'm not a person who can explain the sources or rivers or streams or lakes, but I do feel the pull of water.  Being a Yooper, I have Lake Superior in my blood.  Perhaps I'm part waterfall, blood crashing through my body at Niagara speeds.  

It was Labor Day in the United States.  Most people get a three-day weekend, culminating on Monday with celebrations of the working class and labor unions.  There are even parades and community picnics in some places.  

Me?  I grilled hotdogs and bratwursts, boiled corn on the cob, and feasted with my wife and kids.  It's really the last hurrah of summer before the work of autumn really begins.  Tomorrow, my son starts his junior year of high school.  My daughter starts her last year in the Upper Peninsula before she heads downstate for medical school.  And the trees commence their annual marathon of oranges and golds and reds.

In a lot of ways, this time of the year reminds me of a waterfall--everything rushing along toward some distant, wintry ocean.  There's no way to slow things down.  Instead, I just seal myself in a barrel, roll myself into the current, and hope there aren't any rocks at the bottom to tear me apart.  

In case you can't tell, Saint Marty is not a fan of pumpkin spice anything.

September 1: "No Time," Swamp Time, Love/Hate

I spent a good portion of today in a swamp, 

It was the annual Bayou Art Walk.  Artists, musicians, and writers set up booths throughout the bayou to hawk their wares.  I was there to pass out poetry and talk to a lot of really lovely individuals.  It's amazing to me how people get so excited about the gift of poetry.  I had a box of poetry collections and journals, and every person who walked by got to choose a book and/or haiku postcard.  Some grabbed several postcards.  A few took two and three books.  High school and college students.  Seniors.  Twenty-, 30-, and 40-somethings.  

Nobody was in a hurry.  Time sort stood still in that green, green place.

But Billy Collins has no time at all . . .

No Time 

by: Billy Collins

In a rush this weekday morning,
I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery
where my parents are buried
side by side beneath a slab of smooth granite.

Then, all day, I think of him rising up
to give me that look
of knowing disapproval
while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.

My relationship with time has always been a love/hate one.  I love that most of my days are boiling over with activity, but I hate how exhausted and peopled-out I get most nights.  I love teaching and poeming and hosting library events, but I hate grading papers and submitting poems and being hyper self-conscious.  I enjoy friends and family and audiences, but I crave solitude.

Most of all, I wish I had more times like today when I'm not obsessively aware of passing seconds, minutes, and hours.  I want to be unhurried, peaceful.  I guess what I'm saying is that I wish I could spend more time in a swamp where frogs gobble schedules like mosquitoes or flies.

Saint Marty just needs to sit on a lily pad, strum a banjo, and sing "The Rainbow Connection."  Find his inner Kermit.