May 7: Bugs Bunny, Nick Flynn, "Cartoon Physics, part 1"

Every Saturday morning when I was a kid, I would watch Bugs Bunny cartoons.  Two hours and a bowl of Lucky Charms.  That was my ritual.  I had every single Looney Tunes cartoon memorized, from Elmer Fudd singing The Barber of Seville to Marvin the Martian talking about his Q-36 Space Modulator.  And of course, there was Wile E. Coyote in his eternal pursuit of the Road Runner.

I don't know if I was a weird child, but I always wanted the Coyote to catch the Road Runner.  At least one time.  I felt bad for Wile E. every time he fell into a canyon or got blown up or run over by a truck.  I think, in some way, I connected with his obsession.  I understood wanting unattainable things.  I wanted to travel to Skull Island and see King Kong.  Climb aboard the Millenium Falcon and jump to hyperspace.  Spend some time in school detention with Molly Ringwald.

Yes, all good fantasies.  Yet, there was always that Wile E. Coyote moment:  running off the cliff, pumping legs, freezing in mid-air, looking down, and understanding the physics of disappointment.  That's a lesson I learned from watching Loony Tunes.

And that's what Nick Flynn is writing about in today's poem.

Now, if you'll excuse Saint Marty.  He has some cliffs to run off today.

Cartoon Physics, part 1

by:  Nick Flynn

Children under, say, ten, shouldn't know

that the universe is ever-expanding,   

inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies

swallowed by galaxies, whole

solar systems collapsing, all of it

acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning

the rules of cartoon animation,

that if a man draws a door on a rock

only he can pass through it.   

Anyone else who tries

will crash into the rock. Ten-year-olds

should stick with burning houses, car wrecks,   

ships going down—earthbound, tangible

disasters, arenas

where they can be heroes. You can run

back into a burning house, sinking ships

have lifeboats, the trucks will come

with their ladders, if you jump

you will be saved. A child

places her hand on the roof of a schoolbus,   

& drives across a city of sand. She knows

the exact spot it will skid, at which point

the bridge will give, who will swim to safety

& who will be pulled under by sharks. She will learn

that if a man runs off the edge of a cliff

he will not fall

until he notices his mistake.

Who says cartoons aren't educational?

May 6: Abebe Bikila, Nick Flynn, "Marathon"

A friend of mind is running her first 5K race tomorrow morning.  She's nervous, even though she's probably in better shape than 80 percent of the people who will be running with her.  I understand, though.  No matter how many races I've run, I still get sick to my stomach before the starter's pistol goes off.

I haven't been running much for a while.  I need new shoes, but I can't afford to get them.  (My shoe of choice costs about $180 a pair.)  It bothers me that the weather is turning warm and I can't run.  I have friends who've run in the Boston Marathon.  (One of my friends was about fifteen or twenty minutes away from the finish line when the bombs went off in 2013.)  I know that, if I run in my current shoes, I will end up injuring myself.  So, I'm sidelined for the time being.

Nick Flynn, who's from Boston, wrote an incredibly moving poem about the Boston Marathon bombings.  Somehow, for me, it really captures the spirit of sport.  The drive that most runners feel.  Always moving forward, into the clouds.

Maybe Saint Marty will go running barefoot.  It worked for Abebe Bikila.  Twice.

Marathon

by:  Nick Flynn

                                                Petals

on a river, a tree in blossom, one

pink bud—unopened—falls

& is carried downstream & out

to sea. From

above the other petals seem to 

carry it. Closer—

this is our map, these our

footprints, we

grew up drinking this water. At the

start there

was doubt, we lit a torch, no one

believed we would

make it. Closer—

the legs, the heart, the lungs. It's

too soon to say

we were lucky, it's too soon to say

anything

until the cloud is pulled back

from the sky, until the ringing is

pulled back from the bells. Look—

everyone we've ever known

runs without thinking

not away but into the cloud, where we are

waiting

Abebe Bikila winning the marathon at the 1960 Rome Olympics

May 5: First Reader, Nick Flynn, "Alan Dugan . .."

My wife always reads my posts before I publish them.  She corrects my typographical errors, asks me questions when something I write doesn't make sense.  She has been my first reader for a very long time.  I know that if something can pass her inspection, it's probably pretty good.

She usually doesn't have a whole lot to say about my blog posts.  She reads them, corrects them, publishes them.  I have written close to three thousand blog posts.  That's a lot.  Some of the posts have been pretty damn good.  Some of them have sucked the big one.

Nick Flynn's poem for tonight is about a friend telling him that his writing sucks.

Hopefully, Saint Marty's wife won't think this post sucks. 

Alan Dugan Telling Me I Have a Problem With Time

by:  Nick Flynn

He reads my latest attempt at a poem
and is silent for a long time, until it feels
like that night we waited for Apollo,
my mother wandering in and out of her bedroom, asking,
Haven't they landed yet? At last
Dugan throws it on the table and says,
This reads like a cheap detective novel
and I've got nothing to say about it. It sits,
naked and white, with everyone's eyes
running over it. The week before
he'd said I had a problem with time,
that in my poems everything
kept happening at once. In 1969,
the voice of Mission Control
told a man named Buzz
that there was a bunch of guys turning blue
down here on Earth, and now I can understand
it was with anticipation, not sickness. Next,
Dugan says, Let's move on. The attempted poem
was about butterflies and my recurring desire
to return to a place I've never been.
It was inspired by reading this
in a National Geographic: monarchs
stream northward from winter roosts in Mexico,
laying their eggs atop milkweed
to foster new generations along the way.
With the old monarchs gone (I took this line as the title)
and all ties to the past ostensibly cut
the unimaginable happens--butterflies
that have never been to that plateau in Mexico
roost there the next winter. . . .I saw this
as a metaphor for a childhood I never had,
until Dugan pointed out
that metaphor has been dead for a hundred years.
A woman, new to the workshop, leans
behind his back and whispers, I like it,
but the silence is seamless, as deep
as outer space. That night in 1969
I could turn my head from the television and see
the moon
filling the one pane over the bed completely
as we waited for Neil Armstrong
to leave his footprints all over it.

May 4: Burdens, Nick Flynn, "Twenty-Pound Stone"

Everyone carries burdens, things that weigh them down.  Worry or guilt or need.  The last few nights, I've had trouble sleeping because of the changes that are about to occur in my life.  The semester is over, and my university paychecks are going to stop coming soon.  In a month, I will be starting my new job; that means a new work schedule with new responsibilities and new stress.  At the end of June, I will be teaching my first online course.  My daughter is taking driver's training this summer.

Those are a few of my burdens right now.  I could also talk about the fact that my daughter never puts her socks in the clothes hamper.  She also leaves her bed unmade all the time.  My son's medication is still not working properly; he threatens his sister's life with a toy sledgehammer on a daily basis.

Burdens come in all shapes and sizes.  Teenage daughters.  Grains of sand.  Dirty socks.  Pebbles.  Twenty-pound stones.

Saint Marty is going to have a glass of wine tonight.  Alcohol is not a coping mechanism.  It just makes burdens look like unicorns with pink horns.

Twenty-Pound Stone

by:  Nick Flynn

It nests in the hollow of my pelvis, I carry it with both hands, as if
offering my stomach, as if it were pulling me forward.

At night the sun leaks from it, it turns cold, I sleep with it
beside my head, I breathe for it.

Sometimes I dream of hammers.

I am hammering it back into sand, the sand we melt into glass,
the glass we blow into bottles.

This stone is fifteen green bottles with nothing inside.

It never bleeds, it never heals, it is a soup can left on the back shelf,
the label worn off.

It is the corner of a house, the beginning of a wall.

At night it changes shape, it lies on one side, casting jagged shadows.

It brightens where my tongue touches it.

Richard's eyes were this color, a pale fruit, honeydew.

When I swing it over my head I swear it could lift me.

If I jump from a bridge it would drag me down, the current couldn't
carry us, it has no lungs, no pockets of air.

If I could walk it to the center of a frozen pond & leave it,
in the spring it would be gone.

This is your burden on wine . . .

May 3: A Relic, Nick Flynn, "Amber"

Most blog posts start with the word "I."  It centers the post on the poster.  Freezes a moment in time.  Tonight, after I hit "Publish," this little reflection will be an artifact of my life.  The bones of the dinosaur of May 3, 2016, at 9:26 p.m.

I try not to make every post I write about me.  Switch it up.  Tonight, it's about posterity.  I wonder, two or ten or twenty years from now, when someone stumbles across this little time capsule, what that someone will think.  That I'm a raging egomaniac, maybe.  That's I'm writing about absolutely nothing, maybe.  That all I'm writing right now is just prelude to the main event:  another poem by Poet of the Week Nick Flynn.  That's a little closer.

Here's what I want preserved in this little piece of amber:  my daughter sitting with me on the couch, watching a documentary about Janis Joplin; my wife and son asleep in the other room; outside, rain falling off and on; some kind of cold sitting in my chest; and a feeling that everything is right, okay, good even.

That's Saint Marty's relic for this night.

Amber

by:  Nick Flynn

Hover
the imagined center, our tongues
grew long to please it, licking

the walls, a chamber built of scent,

a moment followed by a lesser moment
& a hunger to return. It couldn't last. Resin

flowed glacially from wounds in the bark
pinned us in our entering
as the orchids opened wider. First,

liquid, so we swam until we couldn't.
Then it felt like sleep, the taste of nectar

still inside us. Sometimes a flower

became submerged with us. A million years
went by. A hundred. Swarm of hoverflies,
cockroach, assassin bug, all

trapped, suspended

in that moment of fullness,
a Pompeii, the mother

covering her child's head forever.

Doesn't look a thing like me . . .

May 2: Glass of Wine, Poet of the Week, Nick Flynn, "Bag of Mice"

 I found Nick Flynn this evening on a website that had a title like 10 of the Most Bad-Ass Contemporary American Poets.  I was curious, so I clicked.  And I have to agree:  Nick Flynn is pretty bad-ass.

Therefore, Nick Flynn is the Poet of the Week.

I'm still not feeling 100 percent tonight.  I took some Motrin when I got home, and then I took a nap.  A nice, long nap.  When I got up, I had rebounded about 70 percent, whether it was the sleep or the medication.  I have more energy right now than I've had all day long.

Nick Flynn's poem for today is stunning, full of dark beauty.  It's one of those poems that makes me want to pick up my pen and write.  And, now, I have some time to do just that.  My only problem is this stupid illness, whatever it is.

Saint Marty hopes to write about a bag of mice soon, maybe after a glass of wine.  Or two.

 Bag of Mice

by:  Nick Flynn

I dreamt your suicide note
was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag,
& in the bag were six baby mice. The bag
opened into darkness,
smoldering
from the top down. The mice,
huddled at the bottom, scurried the bag
across a shorn field. I stood over it
& as the burning reached each carbon letter
of what you'd written
your voice released into the night
like a song, & the mice
grew wilder.

I'm in it for the money, too