October 15, 2025: “The Promise,”. Anniversary Dinner, “Beaver Moon”

Greetings, faithful disciples!

No, I didn’t write a blog post yesterday, which was my 30th wedding anniversary.  “Why?” you may ask.  Because, my wife and I celebrated our three decades of matrimony tonight with an anniversary dinner.  (Last night, I hosted an event at the library, so we didn’t have time to raise a glass to our years of endurance.  Make no mistake—marriage is as much about enduring the storms as it is about making love on a Hawaiian beach.)

Sharon Olds writes about enduring love . . . 

The Promise

by: Sharon Olds

With the second drink, at the restaurant,
holding hands on the bare table,
we are at it again, renewing our promise
to kill each other. You are drinking gin,
night-blue juniper berry
dissolving in your body, I am drinking Fumé,
chewing its fragrant dirt and smoke, we are
taking on earth, we are part soil already,
and wherever we are, we are also in our
bed, fitted, naked, closely
along each other, half passed out,
after love, drifting back
and forth across the border of consciousness,
our bodies buoyant, clasped. Your hand
tightens on the table. You’re a little afraid
I’ll chicken out. What you do not want
is to lie in a hospital bed for a year
after a stroke, without being able
to think or die, you do not want
to be tied to a chair like your prim grandmother,
cursing. The room is dim around us,
ivory globes, pink curtains
bound at the waist—and outside,
a weightless, luminous, lifted-up
summer twilight. I tell you you do not
know me if you think I will not
kill you. Think how we have floated together
eye to eye, nipple to nipple,
sex to sex, the halves of a creature
drifting up to the lip of matter
and over it—you know me from the bright, blood-
flecked delivery room, if a lion
had you in its jaws I would attack it, if the ropes
binding your soul are your own wrists, I will cut them.

It’s a surprising confession on Olds’ part, but one that I completely understand.  Nobody wants to see someone they care about suffer.  So, the speaker of the poem promises to kill her lover if a lion has him in its jaws, metaphorically speaking.  

When my wife and I first started dating, I told her about my fears of growing old alone, with no one to hold my hand or put a damp cloth on my fevered forehead.  Her response was this:  “I’ll be there with you.  We will throw handfuls of peas at each other and have wheelchair races in the hallways.”. I think that pretty much counts as a promise to kill each other.

My wife and I went to our favorite Cajun restaurant tonight for our anniversary.  Our 17-year-old son came with us.  She and I both ordered seafood risotto, and our son got jambalaya.  (I also ordered a chocolate martini and a double gin and tonic.)  For appetizers, we got hush puppies and cheese grit cakes.  When the server came by to offer us dessert, we were all stuffed to the eyeballs.

I remember some things about the day we got married.  It was a cold and wet.  I’d traveled with a friend from Kalamazoo the day before, and autumn was in full bloom—orange and gold and crimson all the way.  After the reception, Brian (my best man) drove us to our hotel.  There was a basket of chocolates in the room, and a heart-shaped jacuzzi was right by the bed.  

Don’t worry, I’m not going to give you all the intimate details.  (If you want that kind of story, I check out Pornhub.)  What I want to tell you is that there was a moon that night.  It was waning gibbous, but still large and bright as a pearl.  And I felt like the luckiest person on the planet.

A lot of things have happened since that night.  Lots of waxing and waning.  And our love has survived all these storms and eclipses.  Thirty years’ worth.  We’ve hiked volcanos.  Seen lava pouring into the Pacific Ocean.  Met Alec Baldwin.  Saw Lily Tomlin on Broadway.  Voted for the first African American President of the United States.  Voted (TWICE!) against a man who wants to be the Adolf Hitler of North America.  Made it through a global pandemic.  Raised two wonderful kids.

But some things never change.  The moon is still rolling across the heavens.  The Simpsons is still on TV.  And my wife and I are still in love with each other.

Saint Marty has a moon poem for you tonight, based on the following prompt from October 1 of The Daily Poet:

You may have noticed the harvest moon of September, but October with its large O looks like a moon.  Write a poem about the moon using multiple O words.  Words with capital O’s look even better. Make a list of some words that begin with O and go go go.

Beaver Moon

by: Martin Achatz

November’s moon belongs to

the beaver, its “O” coasting

in pond and stream water

where that furred construction

worker has slapped and dammed

a home for himself, trapped

all that looming light so that

he can go for midnight 

glides through stars and comets,

become a constellation of tooth

and tail.  Tonight, I’ll stand

under the bowl of heaven, ogle

the bright lunar hole above,

imagine myself coasting with

the beaver through the black

current of night, our bodies

threaded, spooled with light.

March 12: All His Distant Friends, Joy Harjo, Cheerios in my Life

Santiago settles in under the stars . . .

"How do you feel, fish?" he asked aloud. "I feel good and my left hand is better and I have food for a night and a day. Pull the boat, fish."

He did not truly feel good because the pain from the cord across his back had almost passed pain and gone into a dullness that he mistrusted. But I have had worse things than that, he thought. My hand is only cut a little and the cramp is gone from the other. My legs are all right. Also now I have gained on him in the question of sustenance.

It was dark now as it becomes dark quickly after the sun sets in September. He lay against the worn wood of the bow and rested all that he could. The first stars were out. He did not know the name of Rigel but he saw it and knew soon they would all be out and he would have all his distant friends.

My favorite part of this passage--"he would have all his distant friends."

I've been an astronomy enthusiast my whole life--from the time I was about eight or nine and got a telescope for Christmas.  I spent many a night gazing at all my distant friends when I was a kid.  I remember the first time I looked at the moon's craters through my telescope and realized there were mountains and valleys out there in space.  It was a humbling revelation, making me realize how really tiny I was in comparison to everything in the universe.

This evening, I am in Calumet, Michigan, with my wife and son.  I'm here to write and perform in a radio variety show.  These weekends are always kind of a whirlwind of travelling, writing, rehearsing, and acting.  I get to meet and work with a lot of gifted and talented musicians and performers, many of whom I call friends.  

I sometimes wonder how I ended up living a life that has allowed me to do some of the things that I've done.  I've spoken with and interviewed three-time United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, the first Native American ever to hold that position.  I've spoken with and interviewed two-time United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey.  I still have both of their private cell phone numbers as contacts in my cell phone,  I sat in a room with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Sharon Olds for a whole week as she talked poetry, read poetry, and critiqued my poetry.  

I've published a collection of poems.  Released two spoken-word CDs of my poetry.  I was selected to serve as Upper Peninsula Poet Laureate.  Two times.  Consecutively.  I've directed plays and musicals.  Starred in plays and musicals.  I saw Lily Tomlin perform Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe on Broadway.  I met Alec Baldwin.  Saw Elie Wiesel speak in-person about the horrors of the Holocaust.  I touched Vincent Price.  

I have two beautiful, smart kids.  The cutest puppy in the world.  A couple jobs I love.

I don't go around bragging about all the things I've done.  All the brilliant people I've met.  Self promotion is not my thing.  I find people who feel the need to make themselves the brightest stars in the sky a little . . . boring.  They want to be moons and comets and Joy Harjos.  And they're really just bowls of Cheerios.  Bland and milky.

And Saint Marty has to pour a lot of sugar on the Cheerios in his life to make them interesting enough to eat.

January 12: Gone Forever, Emily, Disappear into Memory

Billy was working on his second letter when the first letter was published.  The second letter started out like this:

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die.  He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral.  All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.  The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance.  They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that  interests them.  It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

"When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.  Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes.'"

There's something very comforting about the Tralfamadorian concept of time.  The idea that death is not an end, but just another moment in a person's life that exists alongside birth and graduations and weddings and car accidents and first kisses.  And they all can be revisited, re-enjoyed, re-experienced.

It sort of reminds me of the end of the play Our Town, where Emily dies and decides to return to a moment in her life.  A small, insignificant moment.  A birthday.  What Emily learns is that human beings are completely oblivious.  We are distracted by small, insignificant problems--sour milk, ingrown toenails, pimples, flat tires.  These things get in the way.  Instead of seeing each other, we see the splinters in our fingers instead.

I'm just as guilty as the next person.  Tonight, I will spend my time writing blog posts, checking out Facebook.  My kids will be playing on their Nintendos.  My wife will probably lie down in bed.  We will all be in our own little worlds, focusing on our own needs and wants.  And we probably won't really look at or talk to each other all night long.

If I was from Tralfamadore, it wouldn't matter.  Tomorrow, I could travel back to tonight or last week or this past Christmas.  I could take a trip to four years ago, when my sister and brother were still alive.  Or eight years ago, when my son was born.  If I wanted to, I could go see Lily Tomlin on Broadway again sixteen years ago.  Go trick-or-treating in Detroit, see Star Wars for the first time again.

But I am not Tralfamadorian.  I'm human.  Tonight will come and go.  Disappear into memory.  The only record I will have of this moment is this blog post, these words.  Frozen in the ether of the Internet.  Waiting to be plucked like a ripe plum by some visiting alien.

Greetings from the planet of Saint Marty.

Full moon rising  over the Planet of Saint Marty