May 25, 2025: "Looking at Them Asleep," Nephew, "Last Advice to the High School Graduate"

It is the time of year for change.  The trees are greening, and the lawn mowers are droning.  The days a stretching out, and fewer and fewer nights involve frost.  Pretty soon, the last bells of the schoolyear will be ringing, and kids will be set free for a few months to work at McDonald's, try to score beer outside party stores, and start preparing for college.  And it's time for parents to let go.

Sharon Olds writes about her kids . . . 

Looking at Them Asleep

by: Sharon Olds

When I come home late at night and go in to kiss them,
I see my girl with her arm curled around her head,
her mouth a little puffed, like one sated, but
slightly pouted like one who hasn't had enough,
her eyes so closed you would think they have rolled the
iris around to face the back of her head,
the eyeball marble-naked under that
thick satisfied desiring lid,
she lies on her back in abandon and sealed completion,
and the son in his room, oh the son he is sideways in his bed,
one knee up as if he is climbing
sharp stairs, up into the night,
and under his thin quivering eyelids you
know his eyes are wide open and
staring and glazed, the blue in them so
anxious and crystally in all this darkness, and his
mouth is open, he is breathing hard from the climb
and panting a bit, his brow is crumpled
and pale, his fine fingers curved,
his hand open, and in the center of each hand
the dry dirty boyish palm
resting like a cookie. I look at him in his
quest, the thin muscles of his arms
passionate and tense, I look at her with her
face like the face of a snake who has swallowed a deer,
content, content--and I know if I wake her she'll
smile and turn her face toward me though
half asleep and open her eyes and I
know if I wake him he'll jerk and say Don't and sit
up and stare about him in blue
unrecognition, oh my Lord how I
know these two. When love comes to me and says
What do you know, I say This girl, this boy.

Olds knows her kids, each and every hair on their heads and nail on their fingers.  That's what parents do.  They spend 17 or 18 or 19 years teaching their children how to fly, and then they open the window and watch them wing away.

My daughter will be leaving in July for medical school.  Haven't really wrapped my mind around that fast-approaching cleaving.  This weekend, my nephew graduated from high school.  I attended his ceremony on Friday, and this evening I went to his graduation party.  

It's an exciting time for young people--on the cusp of their first real tastes of adulthood.  I could see it in my nephew's eyes.  They were full of joy and excitement and hope.  That's the way it should be.  Same with my daughter.  Both of them are gazing into the future, while we parents are mourning the little boy who loved playing Angry Birds and the little girl who fell asleep to Frosty the Snowman every afternoon.  

I wish I had enough money to fund both my daughter's and nephew's educations.  I would at the drop of a hat.  (For my international disciples, I should explain that, in the United States, students have to pay to go to college.  I know, I know.  It's messed up.)  Unfortunately, poets don't make a whole lot of money, unless a Pulitzer Prize is involved, so the best I can do is offer love, support, and words.

I have no doubt my nephew and daughter are going to change the world.  They're kind and intelligent and funny.  As Olds says, I know this girl, this boy.  And I couldn't be prouder.

Saint Marty took a day off from The Daily Poet to rite this poem for his nephew . . . 

Last Advice to the
          High School Graduate

by: Martin Achatz

for Caden, May 23, 2025

I know you’re tired of all the advice:
live in the moment, choose kindness,
measure success by the number of people
who love you, follow the path that’s
overgrown and rocky. You’re weary
of all those clichés from us oldsters
who will gladly show you our scars,
name them like willful kids or
monuments on a Civil War battlefield.

Instead, I want to tell you this morning
I found a rabbit in my backyard. His black
eyes panicked, he dragged himself
over the grass, hind legs useless
as driftwood. Perhaps he was dropped
there by a hungry owl after biting
and clawing and screaming, his spine
splintered by the fist of the ground.
I wanted to help mend his broken body, 

watch him bound away into the lilac bushes.
Sometimes, though, beautiful things cannot
be fixed, and all we can do is give thanks
that we have hearts that can be broken
by suffering and tongues to sing something
sacred and tender about this fragile world
you now hold in the palm of your hand.

October 13: The Needle, Senior Night, Uncharted Territory

Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod's gurgling track, pushed her on like giants' palms outspread. The strong unstaggering breeze abounded so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole world boomed before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place; where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a crucible of molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.

Long maintaining an enchanted silence, Ahab stood apart; and every time the teetering ship loweringly pitched down her bowsprit, he turned to eye the bright sun's rays produced ahead; and when she profoundly settled by the stern, he turned behind, and saw the sun's rearward place, and how the same yellow rays were blending with his undeviating wake.

"Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the sea-chariot of the sun. Ho, ho! all ye nations before my prow, I bring the sun to ye! Yoke on the further billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive the sea!"

But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards the helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading.

"East-sou-east, sir," said the frightened steersman.

"Thou liest!" smiting him with his clenched fist. "Heading East at this hour in the morning, and the sun astern?"

Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its very blinding palpableness must have been the cause.
Thrusting his head half-way into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse of the compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost seemed to stagger. Standing behind him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two compasses pointed East, and the Pequod was as infallibly going West.
But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew, the old man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, "I have it! It has happened before. Mr. Starbuck, last night's thunder turned our compasses- that's all. Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I take it."

"Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir," said the pale mate, gloomily.

Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in more than one case occurred to ships in violent storms. The magnetic energy, as developed in the mariner's needle, is, as all know, essentially one with the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be much marvelled at, that such things should be. Instances where the lightning has actually struck the vessel, so as to smite down some of the spars and rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been still more fatal; all its loathsome virtue being annihilated, so that the before magnetic steel was of no more use than an old wife's knitting needle. But in either case, the needle never again, of itself, recovers the original virtue thus marred or lost; and if the binnacle compasses be affected, the same fate reaches all the others that may be in the ship; even were the lowermost one inserted into the kelson.

Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the transpointed compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his extended hand, now took the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that the needles were exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship's course to be changed accordingly. The yards were hard up; and once more the Pequod thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed fair one had only been juggling her.

Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck said nothing, but quietly he issued all requisite orders; while Stubb and Flask- who in some small degree seemed then to be sharing his feelings- likewise unmurmuringly acquiesced. As for the men, though some of them lowly rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate. But as ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly unimpressed; or if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab's.

For a space the old man walked the deck in rolling reveries. But chancing to slip with his ivory heel, he saw the crushed copper sight-tubes of the quadrant he had the day before dashed to the deck.
"Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun's pilot! yesterday I wrecked thee, and to-day the compasses would fain have wrecked me. So, so. But Ahab is lord over the level loadstone yet. Mr. Starbuck- a lance without the pole; a top-maul, and the smallest of the sail-maker's needles. Quick!"

Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now about to do, were certain prudential motives, whose object might have been to revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of his subtile skill, in a matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses. Besides, the old man well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though clumsily practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by superstitious sailors, without some shudderings and evil portents.

"Men," said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him the things he had demanded, "my men, the thunder turned old Ahab's needles; but out of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own, that will point as true as any."

Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as this was said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic might follow. But Starbuck looked away.

With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of the lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining, bade him hold it upright, without its touching the deck. Then, with the maul, after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, he placed the blunted needle endwise on the top of it, and less strongly hammered that, several times, the mate still holding the rod as before. Then going through some small strange motions with it- whether indispensable to the magnetizing of the steel, or merely intended to augment the awe of the crew, is uncertain- he called for linen thread; and moving to the binnacle, slipped out the two reversed needles there, and horizontally suspended the sail-needle by its middle, over one of the compass cards. At first, the steel went round and round, quivering and vibrating at either end; but at last it settled to its place, when Ahab, who had been intently watching for this result, stepped frankly back from the binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed,- "Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not lord of the level loadstone! The sun is East, and that compass swears it!"

One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes could persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they slunk away.

In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal pride.

Say what you want about Ahab.  Yes, he's obsessed, crazy, prideful, mean, rage-filled.  He keeps his crew in a constant state of fear with his behaviors.  Starbuck has his misgivings, but he, at this point in the novel, will not cross Ahab.  With this little act of magnetic magic, Ahab proves that he's not to be trifled with.  He is commander of the Pequod's fate and has a needle of his own making as a guide.

It's has been really easy for me to become unmoored recently.  I think it has something to do with my daughter navigating the seas of her senior year of high school, and me navigating the seas of fathering her through this time.  I can't tell her exactly what she needs to do.  That's not my job.  I can urge.  Gently suggest.  Remind.  Goad.  But I can't tell her what school to attend next year or what her major should be.  That's all her.

After doing this father job for 18 years, I now find myself having to step back from the steering wheel.  That's pretty tough.  Last night, I attended my daughter's last home football game where she was playing in the marching band.  It was senior night, so, at half time, my wife and I walked out onto the field and stood beside our daughter as she was introduced.  She even let us kiss her in front of the crowd.

Now, I'm not a big football fan.  In fact, I brought a book to every game I attended.  I wasn't there for the touchdowns.  I was there for the music and the half-time show.  That's it.  My Friday nights, September through October, were spent on metal bleachers, watching a game I don't quite understand.

That being said, I'm going to miss those Friday nights.  Not because I care about football.  Because it was a time to connect with my daughter.  Watch her do something she loves to do:  play her flute with a band.  Then, go out to dinner with her.  Laugh.  Spoil her a little bit.  Show her how much I love her.

My compass has become reversed.  Instead of knowing where I'm headed, I'm striking out into uncharted territory.  A couple times this past week, my daughter asked me to come to her room upstairs and tuck her into bed.  I sang her the songs that I sang to her when she was small.  Said the same prayers.  She snuggled into my chest, and, for a few moments, she was that little girl again, who watched Frosty the Snowman every day after school, listened raptly as I read her Charlotte's Web, collected Barbies.

Saint Marty is thankful for those small moments with his daughter.

January 13: Nostalgia, Tracy K. Smith, "The Good Life"

Nostalgia is a strange thing.  It makes a person happy and sad at the same time.  This morning, I was watching my son sleeping next to my wife.  He always crawls into bed with her after I get up to get ready for work.  He looked really small next to her, like he was still two or three years old.

And that made me think of my daughter when she was four or five.  How she would get off the bus from preschool and climb onto the couch with me.  We would watch "Frosty the Snowman," and she would fall asleep on my chest.  She was like a little furnace, and I would stay there, sweating, replaying Frosty's trip to the North Pole over and over, until she woke up.

I didn't know it then, but that really was the good life.  My beautiful little girl, sleeping in my arms, completely trusting me to keep her safe. 

Saint Marty misses those times.

The Good Life

by:  Tracy K. Smith

When some people talk about money
They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
Who went out to buy milk and never
Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
Like a woman journeying for water
From a village without a well, then living
One of two nights like everyone else
On roast chicken and red wine.

September 5: Headline, Artifacts of Love, Linda Gregg, "Everyday Rice," Confessions of Saint Marty

Taken earlier when Ives and the priest had first arrived, the photograph showed the grandmother wrapping her arms around Mr. Ives, their expressions sorrowful, intensely sympathetic, perhaps even understanding.  The headline above the photograph:  "Forgiveness?"

Ives tries to salvage something out of the wreckage of his son's death.  Rather than existing in a constant state of disbelief and fury, he chooses to walk a different path:  forgiveness.  It's not an easy choice for him.  It's a path still littered with crushing grief and doubt in God.  But Ives tries to create something beautiful out of the debris of his love for Robert.

Each person's life is full of ruins and artifacts of love.  Like a child, every love grows and matures and changes.  For example, the passion I first felt when I met my wife has grown into something stronger, steadier.  There have been lots of storms along the way.  Mental illness.  Addiction.  Separation.  There have also been lots of golden times, as well.  Pregnancies.  Births.  Trips.  Birthdays.  Anniversaries.  That's all part of the deal.

My daughter is starting high school on Tuesday.  Pretty soon, she will have to think about what she wants to be when she grows up.  When she was in elementary school, she wanted to illustrate children's books.  I'm pretty sure her aspirations have changed.  She's a normal high school freshman.  Translation, she has no idea what she wants to be.

I remember her first day of preschool.  When she climbed the steps of the bus, she looked like a jittery rabbit in an open field.  When she got home, she climbed onto my chest and slept for two hours as Frosty the Snowman played over and over on the DVD player.  I held her and said to myself that I would never let anything hurt her.  Ever.

Of course, that's an impossible promise to keep.  If you have love in your life, you will also have hurt and pain.  The stronger the love, the deeper the hurt.  My daughter really loved my sister, Sally.  The day my sister died, my daughter fell apart in my arms.  I couldn't protect her from the ruins.  Now, she's rebuilding her life around the crater of my sister's absence.

That's what we all do.  We love.  We lose.  We love again.  Over and over.  Layer upon layer.  It's the archaeology of life.

Saint Marty hopes that he doesn't have many more ancient pyramids to uncover any time soon.

Everyday Rice

by:  Linda Gregg

Some kinds of love
leave only wreckage behind, as war does.
The world creates itself out of the debris.
Greece at its finest left ruins
and the clanging silence.  The world keeps
the damage along with the patches of light
between these overlapping branches of aspen.
Akhmatova used Dostoyevsky's description
of Kirilov after he hanged himself,
dangling near the cupboard.
There is the smell of narcissus blooming
as I walk across the cabin to rinse the rice
five or six times before making it into dinner.

Confessions of Saint Marty

December 12: "A Christmas Pageant for Americans," Christmas Program, Piece of Mind

"'A Christmas Pageant for Americans.'  It stinks, but I'm Benedict Arnold.  I have practically the biggest part," she said.  Boy, was she wide-awake.  She gets very excited when she tells you that stuff...

Phoebe is telling Holden about her Christmas program at school.  She's making sure Holden is coming to see her as Benedict Arnold.  Of course, Holden assures her that he's going to be front and center for her performance, even though their father is flying to California and won't be in attendance.  Christmas doesn't seem to be a big deal in the Caulfield household.


This morning, I went to my son's school Christmas program.  The program was based on a children's Christmas poem, with musical interludes.  I didn't hear too much of the poem.  There were too many people jumping up-and-down to take pictures and wave at their kids.  My son looked great in his little tie and vest outfit, and his face lit up like a comet when he caught sight of my wife and me in the audience.  And, even though the transitions between songs and speakers took an ice age, I really enjoyed myself.

The program sort of reminded me of better Christmases, better years.  I was able to put aside all my worries and cares for a little while and just be happy.  I didn't want to leap to my feet and yell out "Humbug!" at any point during the morning.  Well, maybe once, when some person tried to cut in front of me in the ticket line.  However, the person was politely informed that the line ended over there, about a quarter mile down the hallway.  Merry freakin' Christmas, dumbass.

If you're struggling this holiday season, finding it hard to muster up even a modicum of yuletide oomph, I recommend going to a children's Christmas program.  Even a crappy program is going to lift your spirits.  There's something about all those little kids, dressed in their Christmas finery, grinning and waving like maniacal elves, that is an antidote to even the most severe bout of Scrooge-ness.  For me, that joyful glow lasted all afternoon long.

I watched "Frosty the Snowman" and "A Charlie Brown Christmas" with my son this afternoon.  I sat on the floor with him and helped him make a paper snowman to hang on our porch window.  I even cut out some paper snowflakes.  It was a blast.  For probably the first or second time this December, I actually enjoyed doing something Christmasy.

And that's a piece of Saint Marty's mind.

A perfect morning for a dreary holiday season