June 1-2: Not Again, Monkey Wrenches, a Silhouette

The last thought of a bowl of petunias . . .

Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again.  Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.

I will be the first to admit that I know nothing about the nature of the Universe.  You see, just when I think I've got things figured out, something happens that makes me recalculate my whole life.  It can be a daughter graduating from high school.  The death of someone with whom I went to high school.  The loss of a job.  The election of a man completely unfit to be President of the United States.  Mental illness.  Addiction.  The Universe simply has a way of throwing monkey wrenches into the gears of the life.  Just ask a bowl of petunias.

In the last month or so--actually, it's been since I left my job at the surgery center where I worked for over 20 years--I've had a really difficult time writing anything coherent or beautiful.  That's a pretty difficult thing for me to admit.  I have two writing projects that I committed to finish back around mid-May, and I haven't been able to get anything down on paper.  I struggle with even the tiniest request--a letter of recommendation or a short bio of my daughter for the church bulletin.

Take this post, for instance.  I started it yesterday afternoon.  I typed the first two paragraphs, and then I sat staring at the screen of my laptop for about an hour, not knowing how to continue.  That is something that I'm not used to, considering that I've been writing daily blog posts for going on ten years now.  Good or bad, I written these virtual letters to my readers and sent them out into the ether to be loved, hated, or ignored.  Yet, yesterday I couldn't seem to find a center.

That's how I write blog posts.  I find some central thought or idea that's monopolizing my intellectual energy.  It may be my daughter's graduation or trouble at work or some international news event.  And that's what I write about for the day.  Doing this, I've found that I'm able to process a lot of my life struggles.  There are times when I just can't write directly about problems that I'm having.  They're either too personal for myself or someone I love.  Then I write around the subject.

I learned this technique from a great writer friend of mine, Matt Gavin Frank.  What he does with big, hairy, elusive topics is write about everything that surrounds the topic.  For example, if he's trying to write about the death of his grandfather, he writes about jazz music and giant squids and ice cream and the Great Depression.  By doing this, he creates a space in his words that is a silhouette of his grandfather.  Like those silhouettes of heads you create in elementary school art class.  So, by not writing about his grandfather, he creates a picture of his grandfather.

I probably did not explain that very well.  However, when I'm trying to deal with a subject that I can't tackle head-on, that is what I do.  I silhouette it with words.  Create a hole in its shape.

It is now over 14 hours since I typed that last paragraph.  I have spent the day mowing my lawn, stacking firewood, having dinner, playing games with my family around a campfire, and saying bedtime prayers with my son.  I feel as though I haven't accomplished anything this weekend, which is the way that I've felt for almost three months now.

There.  I have created a silhouette.  Written around something that I just can't look in the face tonight.  It has to do with feeling really tired and adrift.  Unsure of where my life is heading.  My daughter is upstairs in her bedroom with friends, laughing and watching Netflix.  My son is asleep in bed, and my wife is lying down with him.  And I'm sitting in my kitchen, alone with all my self-doubt, feeling like a bowl of petunias falling to its death through a planet's atmosphere.

And Saint Marty is thinking, Oh no, not again.

March 30: Book Club Meeting, Mark Strand, "From the Long Sad Party"

Just finished our Book Club meeting.  We read Pot Farm by my friend, Matt Gavin Frank.  Matt joined us for pizza and chicken wings and brownies.  We talked about marijuana and family and diamond smuggling and the Mormon religion.  Oh, and we talked about his book.  He was such fun.

I don't have much more to add.  I will return to Slaughterhouse tomorrow night.  Too tired right now for deep thoughts.

Saint Marty is thankful that he did not have a long, sad party this evening.

From the Long Sad Party

by:  Mark Strand

Someone was saying
something about shadows covering the field, about
how things pass, how one sleeps towards morning
and the morning goes.

Someone was saying
how the wind dies down but comes back,
how shells are the coffins of wind
but the weather continues.

It was a long night
and someone said something about the moon shedding its
white
on the cold field, that there was nothing ahead
but more of the same.

Someone mentioned
a city she had been in before the war, a room with two
candles
against a wall, someone dancing, someone watching.
We began to believe

the night would not end.
Someone was saying the music was over and no one had
noticed.
Then someone said something about the planets, about the
stars,
how small they were, how far away.

June 1: Spendthrift Genius, John Coltrane, "The Mad Feast"

It is, then, a small world there in the goldfish bow, and a very large one.  Say the nucleus of any atom in the bowl were the size of a cherry pit; its nearest electron wold revolve around it one hundred and seventy-five yards away.  A whirling air in his swim bladder balances the goldfish's weight in the water; his scales overlap, his feathery gills pump and filter; his eyes work, his heart beats, his liver absorbs, his muscles contract in a wave of extending ripples.  The daphnias he eats have eyes and jointed legs. The algae the daphnias eat have green cells stacked like checkers or winding in narrow ribbons like spiral staircases up long columns of emptiness.  And so on diminishingly down.  We have not yet found the dot so small it is uncreated, as it were, like a metal blank, or merely roughed in--and we never shall.  We go down landscape after mobile, sculpture after collage, down to molecular structures like a mob dance in Breughel, down to atoms airy and balanced as a canvas by Klee, down to atomic particles, the heart of the matter, as spirited and wild as any El Greco saints,  And it all works.  "Nature," said Thoreau in his journal, "is mythical and mystical always, and spends her whole genius on the least work."  The creator, I would add, churns out the intricate texture of least works that is the world with a spendthrift genius and an extravagance of care.  This is the point.

Dillard loves focusing on the minutia of creation.  Atoms and electrons and algae and dauphnias (which is a small freshwater crustacean used to feed aquarium fish).  The tiniest matter of the universe, for Dillard, holds the key to understanding the universe.  Rather than looking always to the stars to find the face of God, Dillard looks downward and inward.  She finds divinity in the capillaries of a goldfish tail.  Prophetical nature.

I, of course, agree with Dillard.  You only have to look at the fractal landscape of an icicle to know that there's something more at work than frozen water.  The creator, as Dillard says, invests as much genius in snowflakes as black holes.  We are surrounded by extravagant design every day, and Dillard finds great inspiration in it.

I am not a biologist or physicist or naturalist.  I appreciate nature in all of its complexity and beauty, could spend hours watching the breakers of Lake Superior on a stormy November day.  On a daily basis, however, I am indoors a majority of the time, with little exposure to windows.  Therefore, I must glean my daily inspiration from other sources.  Most of time, those sources are writers.

For instance, at the moment, I am rereading a book by a friend and colleague of mine.  It's called The Mad Feast, and it's a collection of essays about food.  No, it's not a cookbook, although it does contain recipes.  Matt, the author, sort of explodes the meaning of food.  For instance, in an essay about Okie Sirloin (barbecued bologna), he contemplates the Dust Bowl, migration, and the evolution of the parking meter.  It's weird and, at times, frustrating to read.  But it excites me, the way, I imagine, listening to John Coltrane excites a jazz musician.  It pushes the boundaries of food writing and travel writing and writing, in general.

Now, will I ever write like Matt?  Probably not.  It's just not me.  However, reading his book gives me license to be weird, attempt things I wouldn't normally attempt.  I have poems to write for an editor.  Poems that are pushing me in an artistic direction that makes me a little uncomfortable.  That's okay.  This is the point of creation, to invest an extravagance of care in the least works.  I need to surrender myself to that extravagance, the way Dillard and my friend, Matt, do. 

Saint Marty is on the prowl for a little spendthrift genius tonight.

February 29: Fall Like Adam, Leap Day, Poet of the Week, Matt Gavin Frank

I am puffed clay, blown up and set down.  That I fall like Adam is not surprising.  I plunge, waft, arc, pour, and dive.  The surprise is how good the wind feels on my face as I fall.  And the other surprise is that I ever rise at all.  I rise when I receive, like grass.

Falling and rising.  Like Adam on that apple day, making a choice, accepting the consequences.  With one bite of that naked fruit, he sentenced Annie Dillard and me and you to a lifetime of falling, plunging, wafting, arcing, pouring, diving.  That's what life is:  a constant lesson in falling and learning how to rise, reaching down and then up again.

Today is Leap Day.  February 29.  It happens once every four years.  Always in a presidential election year in the United States.  Always in a Summer Olympics year.  On February 29, you're supposed to make a leap, do something you normally wouldn't do.  Sometimes, like Adam, you fall.  And then you pick yourself up, add some water, and turn your face upward.  Toward the sun.

This morning, it was snowing.  Blowing.  Cars were in the ditch, on top of snowbanks.  It felt like a day when something bad could happen.  Or good.  That was my state all day.  Waiting for something bad or good to come my way.  And I waited.  And waited.

I did not make a conscious leap today.  In the past, I've bought weird hats to wear.  Worn strange earrings.  Gone on trips.  Instead, I went to work and started taking an online class.  Nothing earth-shattering.  I haven't taken a class in a long, long time.  Don't like following other people's schedules, I guess.  Perhaps that's my leap today:  I am a student for the next four weeks.  For better or worse.

Hopefully, I will rise, not fall.

This week, I choose Matt Gavin Frank as Poet of the Week.  Matt is a friend of mine, a writer who always takes chances, makes leaps.

Saint Marty hopes you take the leap with him. 

Elegy for the Whitefish

by:  Matt Gavin Frank

The grandfather, surrounded by Illinois doves,
does not see his wife in the rowboat.  She imagines

smothering him in his sleep, his hair pulling off
with the pillowcase.  The greenest feather

remembers the earth.

The whitefish dive, their beds behind them. 
Women, tighter than glass, forget,

happy...

They raise their fingers before their hands,
whitefish hanging in the seaweed, throat

and spine disown their avenue, begin
to take in air.

Down the street, the synagogue closes its doors,
Rabbi Kaminker packing blue prayer books

into a blue duffel bag.  My grandparents can no longer
buy him lunch, but they still remember the pink

of his wrists.

He holds his son to the radiator vent.  Mrs. Papier
upstairs singing a Polish opera.  In the morning,

he writes my family name on a piece of yellow paper.
He forgets to prepare breakfast,

writing and writing.

February 25: Guns of August, Matt Gavin Frank, "The Mad Feast," Artichoke Dip

Sounds fell all about me; I vibrated like still water ruffed by wind.  Cicadas--which Donald E. Carr calls "the guns of August"--were out in full force.  Their stridulations mounted over the meadow and echoed from the rim of cliffs, filling the air with a plaintive, mysterious urgency.  I had heard them begin at twilight, and was struck with the way they actually do "start up," like an out-of-practice orchestra, creaking and grinding and all out of synch.  It had sounded like someone playing a cello with a wide-toothed comb.  The frogs added their unlocatable notes, which always seem to me to be so arbitrary and anarchistic, and crickets piped in, calling their own tune which they have been calling since the time of Pliny, who noted bluntly of the cricket, it "never ceaseth all night long to creak very shrill."

Noise.  White and otherwise.  Cacophony.  Stridulations.  Piping.  Creaking and grinding.  Dillard writes about all the sounds of nature.  Cicadas and frogs and crickets.  Noise is constant, even in the quietest of places.  Dillard is lying in a sleeping bag in the woods, staring up through trees at the stars, and she's listening to this tiny symphony

This evening, the members of my book club convened at my house.  The book:  The Mad Feast.  The author:  Matthew Gavin Frank.  It's a challenging book that avoids labels.  It's not a cookbook, even though it contains recipes.  It's not a travel book, even though it spans all 50 of the United States.  Matt calls it an "artifact," which makes it sound like a loom from colonial Boston. 

Matt is a friend of mine, a colleague from the university, and he graciously joined us for our little soiree.  The discussion ranged far and wide.  We talked about the book.  And our favorite meal (rack of lamb with mint jelly for me).  Our least favorite food (liver--Matt says he's going to make me like liver somehow).  We discussed the poet John Ashberry and pigeons.  Sea urchin and beaver tail. 

All this may strike you as a bit discordant, like a roomful of violins playing different tunes at the same time.  It wasn't.  Like Dillard zipped up in her sleeping bag, listening to the chatter of insect and amphibian, our book club conversation somehow made sense in the context of Matt's book.  We verbally wrestled, and the night (seasoned with artichoke dip and lasagna) sounded beautiful.

For the record, I love The Mad Feast, in all its weirdness.  It's a book that stretches me as a reader and person.  Sure it can be frustrating (or "annoying" as one of the book club members said), but it's that quality that makes it irresistible.  For me, it really is like a song that you have to learn to love (something by Tom Waits or Neil Young--singers with confounding voices that stretch the definition of music).

So, it was a good gathering with good food and good noise (lots of conversation and laughter and stories).

Saint Marty is full tonight.  He had a mad feast with his friends.

Everyone's a critic . . .

September 14: Best Time, Wedding, Matt Gavin Frank, "For Avery," New Cartoon

"Did you have a good time at the Fair?" she asked as she kissed her daughter.

Fern nodded.  "I had the best time I have ever had anywhere or any time in all of my whole life."

"Well!" said Mrs. Arable.  "Isn't that nice!"

Fern spent the day with Henry Fussy, playing the carnival games, riding the Ferris wheel, sharing cotton candy.  She has become more than a little girl who's content to sit on a stool in her uncle's barn and listen to animals talk.  By the end of Charlotte's Web, Fern has moved into a bigger, wider world.  A world where Henry Fussy is more interesting than her pet pig.


You'll forgive me for not posting yesterday.  My niece got married on Saturday, and I was swept up in the festivities.  I played the pipe organ for the ceremony, and then there was the wedding reception.  Friends, family, salads, cake, and dancing.  By the time I got home last night, I was pleasantly exhausted.

It really was a lovely day.  Seeing two young people so much in love fills me with hope.  The world is in good hands if my niece and her new husband are any indication of the future.  Weddings really are about taking a chance.  Choosing love over cynicism.  Forging a new family, new home, new life in a time that is often ruled by confusion and chaos.

My niece was beautiful.  Her groom looked as if he was a star about to go nova with happiness.  So much joy surrounded me yesterday.  It was impossible not to smile and laugh, dance and clap.  There are few times in life when it's OK just to surrender to goodness.  Yesterday was one of those times.

Saint Marty has a poem about love from Matt Gavin Frank today.

For Avery

by:  Matthew Gavin Frank

For all the loving, love.  Like a hanger
with blue wool on it.  Like a blue sheep

mad with sickness, at the moon
for turning colors.  You bear the burden

of reward.  It weighs about four pounds.

Sometimes, the world hides itself behind
the patio furniture in the way-back

of the garage, the big-armed chairs you will,
one summer, improperly stain, puddling

the patio purple like old murder.

For all the new, renew.  Like the library
book on birdfeeders you will desperately

want to save a dollar on.  Like a recipe
for Harissa, or the child who hates

Harissa, and because of this loves you.

Not because of this:  the

stains at your collar,
the spit-up formula smell ringing

your neck with premature lemon.  That special
way you hang your shirts, carefully, to mask

their heartlessness.

For all the hearts in this apartment, sing
circus songs to a newborn.

Confessions of Saint Marty

September 12: Going to Sleep, Matt Gavin Frank, "Sagittarius Nocturne"

After I am done with this post, I am going to sleep.  My wife is a little annoyed with me at the moment.  She wants to hold a serious conversation with me, and I want to type this post and have a serious conversation with my pillow.

I can't blame my wife.  We haven't seen each other much this week.  I had commitments literally every night this week.  Meetings.  Classes.  Poetry Readings.  Awards ceremonies.  This night is the first we've been together in about five days.

Unfortunately, all I can think about is slumber.  And the poem below by Matt Gavin Frank.

Saint Marty has to work up some energy to hold a conversation with his spouse.

Sagittarius Nocturne

by:  Matthew Gavin Frank

Night heavy
as a cabbage, and I doze
to the dachshund's
chicken bone vomitting,
then swim, dressed like marriage
in only a cummerbund,
to the wet star so on top
of the tool shed, and hear
a single yard of black grass confide
to its finish every morning,
and the coal necklace
on brick where jellyfish,
in blocked uppercase letters,
spell another mystery
without the stroke of a few
fattening photographers,
disorganized white breasts,
the loud treasons of waking.

Sweet dreams, everybody

September 11: Nature Writing, Matt Gavin Frank, "Sagittarius at Dusk"

I got home a little while ago from an evening of Nature Writing.  I judged a nature essay contest this summer, and tonight was the culmination:  awards were given, essays were read, and hot chocolate was imbibed.  It was a lovely evening.

Driving home afterwards along Lake Superior at dusk, I thought more about 9-11.  The waves were crashing against the beach, and the trees were wild with wind.  The moon wasn't in sight, and by the time I hit the highway, it was coal dark.

I'm not going to get all deep and reflective.  I've had enough of that tonight.  I'll leave the heavy stuff to Matt Gavin Frank.

Saint Marty's going to eat some Pringles now.

Sagittarius at Dusk

by:  Matthew Gavin Frank

In the sand, the crab
turns over, shoots its white belly
to the teenage girl, jogging in yellow
shorts.  She thinks it's a dime

but is too wary of the fat-legged
fisherman with the blue-and-white lure
to pick it up, find out
it's a crab.

The fisherman just became a grandfather
at forty-one, holds in his heart
a scrap of metal the size
of a dime.  The purple he sees

is not real, the egret dies eating.
The strangest things keep us alive at dusk.
From this bench, I can see the power plant,
but not the tired people inside

murmuring their small stories
in between small sparks.

Works for me

September 10: Hunger, Matt Gavin Frank, "Sprouts"

I just finished my dinner.  Cheese and crackers.  Some cough drops.  A bag of mixed berry fruit bites.  Not really exciting.  I do have a chocolate croissant, but I'm saving it for my wife as a surprise tonight.

I have a poem about food tonight.  Among other things, Matt Gavin Frank is a foodie.  He's worked in the food industry, written about food, and makes a mean pulled pork sandwich.

Saint Marty doesn't like Brussels sprouts that much, but he loves this poem.

Sprouts

by:  Matthew Gavin Frank

I like Brussells sprouts.  There is something 
even about them, as opposed to erratic, as opposed
to odd.  Even when alone, they are double.  Like
one eye.  We see what we're used to.

Architecturally-correct, each is a habitat
with staircases.  Typically, I add only gray
salt (from Brittany), and cut it down the middle
with a butter knife.  I always expect to find a fly
at its center, looking up at me with red eyes,
indignant that I've halved the work of its mother.

I eat their cores.  I think of the brain
and its leaves.  At rare times, like after
the Urbana chorus of cellos, or that time
when my brother, Ronald, went through
the windshield, I added the mustard.

With butter, salt, and bacon, they're not bad

September 9: Poetry Reading, Matt Gavin Frank, "Communion"

I don't have much time for my second post this evening.  I'm heading out to a reading by poet Michael Madonick.  I'm not familiar with his work, but I feel like cutting loose a little bit tonight instead of holing up in my office, waiting for my daughter to be done with her dance lessons.

The poem I have chosen comes from Matt's collection Sagittarius Agitprop.  It's a quiet little poem that strikes at the heart like an angry hornet.

Saint Marty's been stung tonight.

Communion

by:  Matthew Gavin Frank

There is something of sleep
that is the hushing of a bird's feathers

being shuffled by other birds.
The day travels by train, bridging

both lobes, each errand shuffled
and repeated like a deck of cards.

The cards know the importance
of silence and repeated words:

Each king, each queen, lying back-
to-front with the jacks and numbers, lit

with indecency, must recall
the supermarket, the blue soap

on sale, the hole in the shoulder
of the postman's shirt.  There is something

of the mouth that calls to these,
in the uniform of sleep, as a bird

collecting a flock, an ant, who
when threatened with a fall,

discovers that it can spin a web
like a spider.

Hush of feathers

April 12: Proof, "Autoerotic Asphyxiation," Matt Gavin Frank

Just to prove to you how crappy my poems are, I'm going to prove how good my friend Matt's poems are.

This poem is from Matt Gavin Frank's newest collection of poems, The Morrow Plots.  It's titled "Autoerotic Asphyxiation."

Now, please excuse Saint Marty.  He's going to slip into the nearest bottle of Prozac.

Autoerotic Asphyxiation

The world goes pink with buffoonery,
billions of squirrels

running away.  In their cheeks
acorns arrange themselves

like dog stars, wait
for the constellation

that looks like a camel.
A mesquite jealousy

in humplessness, the stockings
we save for just such an occasion.

We haven't spent
this much time here

since we were seventeen,
when mortality was a barking sky,

an animal a continent away,
this documentary

about Morocco.  Like the squirrels
we move without headlights.

You speak equations
into my ear that would take

the stocking to solve.
Canicula.  Ligature.  In the next

room, we hear my father's
one sharp cough, wonder

if we're not breathing
enough.

Let's just prove how crappy my blog is, too