January 10. 2025: "The Guild," Addiction, "Bulletin Board"

I never knew either of my grandfathers--both long gone before I appeared on the scene.  My mother's father died of stomach cancer.  My dad's father died of a massive heart attack.  (If you're keeping score, that mean's I have two strikes against me, health wise--heart disease and cancer.)  Most of my younger life, I've heard stories about both men, written poems and essays about them.  But I never really knew them, all my knowledge being second- and thirdhand.  

Sharon Olds writes about her father and grandfather . . . 

The Guild

by: Sharon Olds

Every night, as my grandfather sat
in the darkened room in front of the fire,
the bourbon like fire in his hand, his eye
glittering meaninglessly in the light
from the flames, his glass eye baleful and stony,
a young man sat with him
in silence and darkness, a college boy with
white skin, unlined, a narrow
beautiful face, a broad domed
forehead, and eyes amber as the resin from
trees too young to be cut yet.
This was his son, who sat, an apprentice,
night after night, his glass of coals
next to the old man’s glass of coals,
and he drank when the old man drank, and he learned
the craft of oblivion—that young man
not yet cruel, his hair dark as the
soil that feeds the tree’s roots,
that son who would come to be in his turn
better at this than the teacher, the apprentice
who would pass his master in cruelty and oblivion,
drinking steadily by the flames in the blackness,
that young man my father.

Addiction runs in my family.  As the old joke from Arsenic and Old Lace goes, it practically gallops.  I have a high tolerance for alcohol and other substances.  Always have.  Maybe I inherited this tolerance from my dad, who possibly inherited it from his dad.  I really don't have any way to verify these facts, aside from childhood memories of my dad sitting in his chair every night, a 7 and 7 in his cup.  To this day, the smell of whiskey nauseates me.

But I'm not writing about the perils of addiction in this post.  I'm also not writing about my father or grandfathers.  On this Friday night, I'm thinking about inheritance--what gets handed down through the helix of my DNA.  Yes, I'm predisposed to addiction.  I established that already.  But I'm also curious about other things that are tacked to the bulletin board of my makeup.

I have no idea where my penchant for poetry came from.  As far as I know, I'm not the great-great-great-great grandson of Byron or Keats.  I also don't know where my melancholic streak originates.  Sure, my dad could be surly at night, and my older brother's moods are as changeable as Donald Trump's skin tones.  But I don't know if there are any other vestigial fingers or toes of mental illness in my bloodline. 

My day started out with a panic attack--not the kind that feels like a coronary, but one that had me deep breathing the entire drive to my office.  There's a lot of big things happening in these first few months of 2025, and I'm sort of drowning at the moment in the whelming flood of responsibilities.  Plus, teaching at the university starts up again on Monday.  Throw in two or three church services I have to play this weekend, as well.

I met with a friend this morning who's teaching me ways to cope with these emotions with various methods of relaxation and energy.  That helped a great deal.  However, at the end of the long day, I found myself more than a little . . . discouraged is the best word I can come up with.  When I got home, I didn't want to talk to anyone, so I took my puppy for a walk.

I sort of understand why my dad used to drink so much at night.  (Eventually, he realized he had a problem and quit cold turkey.  I never saw him with a 7 and 7 in his hand again.)  He ran his own plumbing business and supported a family of nine kids.  Alcohol was his way of coping with the stress.  He came from the silent generation, so he didn't really talk about his emotions, especially not with a therapist.  

Right now, everyone else in my house is asleep.  I'm sitting in my dark living room, illuminated only by the Christmas tree and my laptop screen.  There's something comforting in this solitude.  All my work is still there, begging for my attention.  Instead, I picked up the poetry collection Late Wife by Claudia Emerson and started reading it.

Maybe my maternal grandfather did the same thing at night.  After his wife and kids were sleeping under their quilts, he stepped outside into the January night, his breath pluming in front of his face.  For a few seconds, he found solace and escape in the moon and stars.  Maybe that's something I inherited from him--that pull toward wonder.

Saint Marty wrote tonight's poem based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:

Choose a letter of the alphabet.  Keeping a notebook with you, write down words that begin with your letter as you come in contact with them.  If your letter is W and you are in the kitchen and you see a wine bottle, write down wine bottle.  If your child comes in whining, write down whining.  If you hear someone whistling, write that down.  Keep writing until you have collected at least twenty-five words.  Use at least fifteen of these words in a poem about something that does not start with the letter you chose.

Bulletin Board

by: Martin Achatz

Every day, I sit in front of it, not really seeing what

the pushpins hold before my face, the kitschy poster

of Bigfoot Knowledge with a pongidae comparison

chart, moving from Bigfoot through human and gorilla

to chimp, each one shorter, more hunched.  I want

to take a permanent marker, write names above

each pongid of the people who make up my troop

of primates.  The coworker who put a plant behind me

because it needed to be near the sunlit panes at my back.

A friend who forgot a present I gave her for Christmas

on my desk (a poem scribbled with my fountain pen

in the pages of my journal).  My 16-year-old son who still

refuses to scoop out the slimy guts of pumpkins, and

my daughter who never visits my office, but looks up

at my window as she walks by, to see if my lights

are on, a pine tree dusting her head with snow.  

On my phone, a photo of my wife, her face bright

as sky above a scrub of pussy willows, fuzzed and bobbing

in a wind.  All these, and more, fill that corked space I ignore

eight or nine house, Monday through Friday, as I deal

with the panics of life.  I see at my feet a sticky note

that fell from the board and now lies facedown on the carpet.

A reminder I wrote several years ago on the morning 

my mother was dying:  "Don't forget to pick up milk."

May 28: Gene Autry, Claudia Emerson, "Animal Funerals, 1964"

As I sit here, typing this second post, I am listening to Christmas music,  Gene Autry singing "Up on the Housetop."  I am still at McDonald's, so I tend to get looks from people walking by, as if listening to Christmas music on Memorial Day weekend somehow makes me suspect.  I want to tell an old gentleman who just shuffled by, pushing a walker and staring at me, that I do not suffer from any form of serious mental illness.  That the music just helps me concentrate, makes me feel happy.  Of course, if I try to explain, I might seem even more unstable. 

I also just discovered, while looking for a Claudia Emerson poem to post, that Ms. Emerson passed away in 2014.  She was only 57.  As I read her New York Times obituary, it made me incredibly sad.  So young and talented. 

Now Bing Crosby is singing "I'll Be Home for Christmas."  It's such a melancholy little tune.  Wistful.  Nostalgic.  It sort of increases the feeling of loss over Claudia Emerson.  No, I didn't know her personally, but there's something incredibly intimate about reading a person's poems.  Like you're reading letters from a really close friend.  And now that close friend is gone.

This Memorial Day weekend, where the dead are honored, I am thinking about loss a little bit.  (Don't worry, I'm also thinking about barbecue and bratwurst.)  And now, I'm adding Claudia Emerson to the list of people I've lost this year.  Loss is a big part of living.  I know this.  I'm just not happy about it.

Maybe Saint Marty should do something to brighten his mood, like watch Terms of Endearment while thinking about the music he wants played at his funeral.  Planning ahead is always uplifting.

Animal Funerals, 1964

by:  Claudia Emerson

That summer, we did not simply walk through
the valley of the shadow of death; we set up camp there,

orchestrating funerals for the anonymous,
found dead: a drowned mole—its small, naked palms

still pink—a crushed box turtle, green snake, even
a lowly toad. The last and most elaborate

of the burials was for a common jay,
identifiable but light and dry,

its eyes vacant orbits. We built a delicate
lichgate of willow fronds, supple, green—laced

through with chains of clover. Straggling congregation,
we recited what we could of the psalm

about green pastures as we lowered the shoebox
and its wilted pall of dandelions into the shallow

grave one of us had dug with a serving spoon.
That afternoon, just before September and school,

when we would again become children, and blind
to all but the blackboard's chalky lessons, the back

of someone's head, and what was, for a while longer,
the rarer, human death—there, in the heat-shimmered

trees, in the matted grasses where we stood,
even in the slant of humid shade—

we heard wingbeat, slither, buzz, and birdsong—
a green racket rising to fall as though

in a joyous dirge that was real,
and not part of our many, necessary rehearsals

Couldn't find Emerson's gravestone, but this one makes me sad, too

May 27: Daughter's Essay, Claudia Emerson, "Daybook"

My daughter had an assignment for her English class.  She had to write a memoir essay about an important moment in her life.  She chose to write about the death of my sister last summer.  I was surprised.  She's never really opened up to me about it before.

Last night, she asked me to read what she had written.  She'd been working on it for a couple of hours.  "Exactly what do you want me to read it for?" I asked.  "Content?  Grammar?  Spelling?"  She shrugged and said, "Just tell me what you think," and flounced off to bed.

I sat reading her essay.  For a half hour.  By the time I was done, I was crying and ready for bed.  The essay was rough but full of the kind of honesty I try to get my freshman composition students to embrace.  It takes my students an entire semester to get there (if they get there at all).  My daughter had it, and I couldn't have been prouder.

I have a Claudia Emerson poem for tonight that's sort of like an essay on loss and grief.  Warning:  it's not very happy.

Saint Marty never promised you a rose garden.

Daybook

by:  Claudia Emerson

This is the season of her dying, and you
have kept it, I find, underneath the stairs
in a box filled with photographs--her daybook
of that last year, the calendar a narrative
she did not intend to write.  In the grid
of days, I see her habit had been to record
in pencil what might be erased, moved, saving
the indelible black for what could not change:

your birthday, hers, your anniversary.  And in
that same decisive hand, the disease began
to eclipse this order, but she erased nothing.
Now from beneath the days the hospital claimed,
her first, latent words emerge, faint but certain
as images of ribs cradling milky lungs, the flesh forgotten
as water you can see through to the bottom.

May 24: Poet of the Week, Claudia Emerson, "Catfish"

I am finding it harder and harder to choose new Poets of the Week.  I keep wanting to go back to my favorites like Sharon Olds and Maya Angelou and Mary Oliver and Billy Collins.  They are poets who make me feel good, who inspire me.

However, I have chosen a new Poet of the Week:  Claudia Emerson.  Emerson won the Pulitzer Prize a few years back for her collection Late Wife.  Tonight's poem is about a subject I know nothing about.  That's alright, though.

I am not feeling very reflective tonight about this poem.  It makes me see the world a little differently.  It doesn't make me want to go fishing or fry up some catfish for dinner, but it does make me want to write.

Saint Marty is leaving profound to Claudia Emerson.

Catfish

by:  Claudia Emerson

It nuzzles oblivion, confuses

             itself with mud. A creature

of familiar taste, it ambushes

               from its nest of ooze the pond's

brighter fish, clears its palate

              with their eggs, lumbers fat

and stagnant into winter, lulled

              into dreams of light sinking until

light drowns, and all is as before.