December 7, 2025: “The Spouses Waking Up in the Hotel Mirror,” Almost Migraine, “Writing Life of Charles Dickens”

Being a poet and blogger is sort of like constantly looking at yourself and your life in a mirror, but not in an egotistical way.  You look to understand and interpret, maybe to find something beautiful.

I’ve been a writer my whole life.  I have a box of old diaries and journals under a bed.  They go all the way back to the fifth or sixth grade.  It was at that time that I decided I wanted to record my thoughts and feelings and experiences.  Gabriel Garcia Marquez has a short story about a family who finds an angel in the backyard; they tie the angel up and charge people money to see him.  I first read that story when I was in ten or eleven, right around the time I started my career as a diarist.  (By the way, I’ve never had the courage to go back and reread those old notebooks.  I’m afraid of what I’ll find out about myself.)

Sharon Olds spends some time gazing at herself in a mirror . . . 

The Spouses Waking Up in the Hotel Mirror

by: Sharon Olds

The man looked like himself, only more so,

his face lucent, his silence profound as if

inevitable, but the woman looked

like a different species from an hour before,

a sandhill crane or a heron, her eyes

skinned back, she looked insane with happiness.

After he got up, I looked at her,

lying on her back in the bed.

Her ribs and breasts and clavicles had

the molded look of a gladiator’s

torso-armor, formal bulge of the 

pectoral, forged nipple, her deltoid

heron-elongated,

I couldn’t get her provenance

but the pelvic bone was wildly curled,

wrung.  I could see she was a skeleton

in there, that hair on her body buoyant

though the woman was stopped completely, stilled as if

paralyzed.  I looked at her face,

bloom-darkened, it was a steady face,

I saw she was very good at staring

and could make up her mind to stare at me

until I would look away first.

I saw her bowled, suffused forehead,

her bony cheeks and jaws, I saw she could

watch her own house burn

without moving a muscle, I saw she could light

the pyre.  She looked very much like her father, that

capillary-rich face, and very

much like her mother, the curlicues

at the corners of the features.  She was very male

and very female.

very hermaphroditical,

I could see her in a temple, tying someone up

or being tied up or being made nothing

or making someone nothing,

I saw she was full of cruelty

and full of kindness, brimming with it—

I had known but not known this, that she was human,

she had it all inside her, all of it.

She saw me seeing that, she liked that I saw it.

A full life—I saw her living it,

and then I saw her think of someone who

ignores her rather as her father ignored her,

and the clear, intransigent white of her eyes

went murky grey, the sections of her face pulled

away from each other like the continents

before they tore apart, long before they drifted.

I saw that she had been beaten, I saw her

looking away like a begging dog,

I averted my eyes, and turned my head

as the beloved came back, and came over to her

and came down to me, I looked into his iris

like looking at a rainstorm by moonrise, or a still

winter lake, just as its cleavages

take, or into crystal, when crystal

is forming, wet as nectar or milk

or semen, the first skein from a boy’s heart.

Looking at yourself closely can be an unpleasant experience.  Olds sees the woman in the mirror not as a reflection of herself.  Rather, she’s able to step outside of her body and appraise herself honestly, without flinching, each hair and scar and blemish mapping her skin like roads and rivers.  The spouse in the poem ignores these imperfections.  He comes to her at the end, his irises looking like “a rainstorm by moonrise, or a still winter lake . . .”  To put it another way, he sees her true self.

So, now it’s my turn to look at myself in the mirror today.  I played keyboard for two church services this morning.  Then I attended the annual Tuba Christmas concert, live-streaming it for the library.  (If you’ve never read heard 30 tubas and euphoniums in one enclosed space playing Christmas carols, you don’t know what you’re missing.  Or maybe you do.)  Then, some shopping.  (I purchased two really ugly Christmas sweaters for myself.)  Finally, dinner (grilled turkey and cheese sandwiches with chicken noodle soup) and a Zoom poetry workshop (the best part of my day).

My whole weekend was like that—one thing after another thing after another thing.  I haven’t really had a whole lot of downtime.  When I got home from Tuba Christmas and shopping, I sat down on the couch to relax for a few minutes.  I turned on the TV, and suddenly my head started pounding and my vision blurred.  My first thought:  I’m having a stroke.  My second thought:  at least I won’t have to grade my students’ final papers.

I lay back on the couch and closed my eyes.  I could feel the room spinning behind my lids.  In the past, I have suffered from bouts of vertigo.  Only once have I experienced a migraine.  After about a half hour, I opened my eyes and got up to help my wife do the dinner dishes and pans.  I could still feel a dull throb in the back of my head, but the world wasn’t merry-go-rounding anymore.  My vision was clear.  

I think I was on the verge of a migraine.  So, I had an almost migraine, I guess.  When I described my symptoms to my wife, she said, “It was a migraine.  You’ve been so stressed.”

My wife was my mirror tonight.  After she made that comment, I thought about the last couple weeks—Thanksgiving, a blizzard, Christmas trees, grading, programs.  Plus all the normal holiday hubbub.  And 30 tubas and euphoniums.  She was right.  Stress + Tuba Christmas = Almost Migraine.

I’m doing better now.  The poetry workshop was the highlight of the weekend.  A couple hours writing with some really good friends was just the medicine I needed.  I’m not quite ready for a new week, but I’m not cemented to a couch with a pillow over my face to block out the light.

Saint Marty wrote a poem for tonight, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:

Write a poem in the form of a to-do list, preferably a to-do list of a famous literary figure.  What would Henry David Thoreau have on his to-do list?  How about Gustav Flaubert?  Perhaps Emily Dickinson’s to-do list would include practicing her scales, writing a letter, baking a ginger cake, ironing her white dress, identifying wildflowers, witnessing a funeral, and quarreling with her sisters or brother.  You will likely need to spend some time to get the order of your list just right, saving the best for last.  Your poem may be humorous or grave/poignant.

Writing Life of Charles Dickens

by: Martin Achatz

Writing 

is like

a long midnight walk

through London streets

when even pickpockets

have gone to bed

in some dark alley

Elizabeth Tower caped

in fog and frost

lost

save for the chimes

quarter past, half past,

quarter to it, the hour

itself—Ga-dooong!

pens lined above

a sheet of Foolscap

well filled with ink

black as a grave

a cup

of strong tea

steeped black

served with a lemon

wedge and biscuit

hawthorn

currant

oolong

a child’s cry 

for water 

after a nightmare,

to douse 

fear blazing 

in his chest

a sunrise

so dazzling

it hurts

to even 

step outside

December 6, 2025: “Cool Breeze,” Missing in Action, “Saturday Afternoon Poetry Reading by MFA Students”

Yes, I have been missing in action for quite some time.  I have no good excuse, aside from exhaustion and shortening days.  Around this time last year, I was sliding into a deep depression that lasted quite a few months.  So I have been keeping pretty close watch on my state of mind and mood.

A lot has happened since my last post.  Just a quick recap:  I got a new car—another Subaru Impreza (an offer from the dealership I couldn’t pass on); Thanksgiving came and went with a raging blizzard that lasted about three days (and about 26 inches); my daughter turned 25 yesterday (hard to believe she’s that old and I haven’t aged at all); and the holiday season is upon us (theme for our front porch this year—A Bigfoot Christmas).

Perhaps the reason I tend to get a little (or a lot) blue this time of year is nostalgia—the sentimental longing for a period, place, or person with wistfully happy associations.  Of course, there’s no way of reclaiming the past, unless you’re Marty McFly or Bill and Ted.  

Sharon Olds gets nostalgic for an old lover . . . 

Cool Breeze

by: Sharon Olds

You talked to me a lot about your kid sister,

Rebecca, a.k.a. Reebabecka,

and you knew me as my sister’s kid sister,

fourteen, and a late bloomer, and homely,

you talked to me about your family,

and your dream of cutting an LP,

and the Juniors and Sophomores you were in love with, or who

were in love with you, or who maybe you had slept with—

they were White, as I was, but you called me Miss Shary

Cobb, Miss Cool Breeze Herself.

You didn’t mind I was in love with you,

you were Senior Class President.

And you would dance with me, astronomer

who pointed out to me the star

bright of the cervix, when we danced it became

exact to me, far inside me

in the night sky.  And you would park with me,

you would draw my hand gently across you, you had

mercy on me, and on yourself.  When you would

slide your hand up under my sweater,

my mouth would open, but I’d stop you, and you would

say, rather fondly, Protecting your sacred

virginity?  And I would say Yes,

I could always tell you the truth.

When the White cops broke up the dance in your neighborhood,

your friends worked to get us out the back

unseen, if the cops saw us together

they would hurt someone.  We crouched behind a hedge,

and I began to understand

you were less safe than me.  Squatting 

and whispering, I understood, as if 

the bending of our bodies was teaching me, 

that everyone was against you—the ones I had called

everyone, the White men

and the White women, the grown-ups, the. blind

and deaf.  And when you died, your LP cut,

and you had married the beauty from your neighborhood,

when you went off the coast road with your White

lover, into the wind off the ocean,

your Jag end over end, catching fire—

I knew that my hands were not free of your

blood, brother—Reebabecka’s brother.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into Olds’ poem, but I do feel a certain sense of nostalgia—the speaker yearning for Reebabecka’s brother and all that he meant.  Sex and race and class and mortality all rolled into one.  Olds, in some way, holds herself responsible for high school lover’s death (“my hands were not free of your / blood”).  

Today at the library, I hosted a reading of MFA poetry students from the local university.  There were about six of them.  All so young and full of hope.  I remember being like them when I was in graduate school—thinking I was going to get a job as a full-time professor, publish a few books, win the Pulitzer Prize, and be set for life.  That’s where they all are right now.  Ready to take on a world that isn’t always that nice to poets.

I found myself getting a little wistful as I sat listening to these grad students share their work.  At the end of my MFA program, my wife had just given birth to our daughter, and I thought I had the world in my hands.  Anything seemed possible.

Then everything came crashing down.  My wife started suffering from serious depressions (she cut her arms and breasts with scissors, leaving scars) and was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder.  A year or so after that, she fell into a cycle of sexual addiction that almost ended our marriage several times.

In short, I really don’t feel nostalgic for all of that shit.  I wouldn’t want to go back to that period in my life for anything.  Except for this:  holding my infant daughter in my arms as she drifted off to sleep, or braiding her long hair after she took her baths.  I miss being everything to my kids—protector, friend, chauffeur, sage, comedian.  There was a time I walked on water as far as my son and daughter were concerned.

My daughter is in medical school now.  My son will be graduating high school this spring.  He’s already talking about moving out.  The future is bright for both of them.  Me?  I have more years behind now me than I have ahead of me.  That makes me a little sad.  (Just a little.  Don’t worry.)

I know I’m very blessed.  My kids are healthy and smart.  My wife has a job she loves, and she’s been doing well with her mental health and addiction issues.  We are more a team than we’ve ever been.  Blessing after blessing after blessing.

Ten years from now, I’m probably going to be nostalgic about tonight.

Saint Marty wrote a poem for today, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:

Try writing some haiku that resist being about apple blossoms, insects, or frogs.  Instead use the 5/7/5 syllables in a series of three-line poems that deal with subjects such as bad hair, infectious diseases, or people who’ve never heard of Rumi.

Saturday Afternoon Reading by MFA Poetry Students

by: Martin Achatz

they read earnestly 

shaping words into creatures

feral as blizzards

I sit in the back

listen as they free their tongues

birds, birds, everywhere

they are all so young

ferment full, ripe as apples

I eat and drink them

when I was their age

I swam in Superior

naked, skin on fire

I’m an old sonnet

iambic, without couplet

don’t volta me yet