August 16: Changes on the Way, Oliver de la Paz, "A Cupboard Full of Halos," New Cartoon

The autumn days grew shorter, Lurvy brought the squashes and pumpkins in from the garden and piled them on the barn floor, where they wouldn't get nipped on frosty nights.  The maples and birches turned bright colors and the wind shook them and they dropped their leaves one by one to the ground.  Under the wild apple trees in the pasture, the red little apples lay thick on the ground, and the sheep gnawed them and the geese gnawed them and foxes came in the night and sniffed them...

Small changes pile up in that paragraph.  The days slipping away sooner.  Frost under the stars.  Green giving way to red and orange and yellow in the trees.  The harvest of pumpkin and squash and wild apple.  August into September.  Summer into autumn.

Yes, changes are on the way in the next couple of weeks.  In one week, I start teaching at the university.  The week after that, my kids go back to school.  My work hours are going to change.  My kids are going to be going to dance lessons and God knows what else.

At the beginning of the summer, I actually had hopes of having a full-time teaching job at the university.  I dreamed of teaching undergraduate- and graduate-level poetry courses.  I would have been able to set my own schedule for the most part.  Volunteer in my son's class.  Drive my kids to school every once in a while.  It was a lovely vision.

However, none of that came to pass.  I'm pretty much stuck working in a medical office and part-timing my teaching.  If I sound disappointed, I am.  However, I'm grateful that I'm still able to be in a classroom.  It's one of my favorite things in the world.

So, as the nights come earlier and frost starts forming on the pumpkins, I accept the coming changes.  Perhaps something wonderful is just around the corner.

The last Oliver de la Paz poem I've chosen is one of my favorites.  It's about miracles in everyday wrapping.  Opening a kitchen cupboard and finding an angel.  That sort of thing.  Maybe I'm doing things wrong.  Maybe I just need to look for my miracles in different places. 

Saint Marty is cleaning his bathroom tonight.  Who knows what he'll find under the sink?

 A Cupboard Full of Halos

by:  Oliver de la Paz

After he fills the junk drawer in the kitchen with wreaths made from scraps of paper, cloth, and sticks, Fidelito stores new ones in a cupboard above the stove.

He drags a stool from the garage and sets it to reach the place where Maria Elena keeps cookbooks.  In the multi-hued halos go, forced.  Some of them tumble out like hula-hoops onto linoleum.  Others become bracelets and slide down his arms as he reaches up to stop them.

When he closes the door, Fidelito forgets until his mother, ready to cook, opens the cupboard.  They spill to her from the dark, a noise of coins from another world.

Confessions of Saint Marty

August 15: A Saint Poem, Oliver de la Paz, "Under the Stained Glass Saints"

For obvious reasons, I'm a sucker for poems about saints.  There are quite a lot of them out there, believe it or not.  One of my favorites is Galway Kinnell's "Saint Francis and the Sow."  Perhaps I'll share it with you guys some day.

I have a saint poem from Oliver de la Paz tonight.  It's got Saint Francis de Sales and Saint Thomas Aquinas.  It reminds me of my Catholic childhood, growing up under the stained glass windows among the flickering votives.

Saint Marty can almost smell the incense in these lines.

Under the Stained Glass Saints

by:  Oliver de la Paz

For squirming, Fidelito receives a pinch from his mother.  Disturbed by his yowl, the once quiet congregation sing their Aves an octave louder.

The boy, uncomfortable under the gaze of Saint Francis de Sales who writes reports on his misbehavior, rubs a welt the size of a nickel on his arm.  The hands of Thomas Aquinas, folded in prayer, frighten him too.  He thinks, if he turns his head, the fingers will spring to life and pinch his ear.  Briefly, Fidelito behaves.

But when the time comes to kneel and the padded boards come down from their hinges, Fidelito straddles one as though it were a horse.  He urges it to run far from the stream of the Saints' blue shadows.  Those praying around him bow their heads and smile.

I'm a sucker for stained glass, too

 

August 14: My Brother, Oliver de la Paz, "Mind-Swimming"

I was paging through Oliver de la Paz's poetry collection Names Above Houses when I came across the poem "Mind-Swimming."  The poem made me think of my brother, Kevin, who passed away in May.

My brother was a stroke survivor.  For the five years following his stroke, he never really let his challenges slow him down.  He still was really active in his church.  He never forgot anyone's birthday.  At Thanksgiving, he begged for my mother's pumpkin pie.  And jokes.  He always had a bad joke to share.

My brother wasn't a saint.  He made a lot of mistakes.  He had diabetes and didn't manage it well.  For a long time, he didn't take insulin because it was too expensive.  Yet, he still had the money to buy cartons of cigarettes.  It really was only a matter of time before his choices caught up to him.

I still can't believe he's gone.  I half expect him to call me on my birthday and tell some horrible pun.  At my parents' house, two framed pictures of my brother now hang on the wall, a constant reminder of him.

Saint Marty is a little melancholy this evening.

Mind-Swimming

by:  Oliver de la Paz

A stroke is like that, according to Domingo.  Pulling up on nets, he suddenly felt heavy.  Close attention to things make them strange.  He felt his leg disappear.  He could smell ink from newspapers.  He could hear the flint struck in a lighter miles away.  And like that quick strike of a flame, Domingo fell to the deck of the boat, watching the horizon before him open like the widening pupil of an eye.

He was a flawed, good guy

August 13: School Days, Oliver de la Paz, "School Years"

Very soon, school is going to be starting up again.  That's one of the things that accompanies the dog days of summer--that vein of sadness from young people who know their sunny time of freedom is about to come to an end.  I have been forbidden by my daughter to mention school in my house at the moment.

This weekend, I will probably put together my syllabi for the fall semester.  I can't avoid it any longer.  In two weeks, I will be teaching again.  I'm excited and sad.  The days are definitely getting shorter.  The weather is getting cooler.  Leaves will be turning mustard and cinnamon colored.  Winter is on the way.

Oliver de la Paz has a poem about school that captures these feelings.

Saint Marty is forbidden to read this poem to his daughter.

School Years

by:  Oliver de la Paz

They last long for Fidelito, who is not of this earth.  With its alphabets and loose-leaf, sheets of construction paper, oranges, blues, lunch boxes, crepe paper, papier-mache, the teacher talk and rasp of chalk, long division, multiplication, pronunciation, spelling and quelled hungers at lunch hour, the recesses of chase the girl/boys catch-as-catch-can, freeze tag, war with rubber balls and big red welts the size of baseballs, war with a deck of cards, war of pencil breaking, or tether ball, kick ball, being goof balls in back near the coat racks, learning to cuss and whistle at the same time, saying Jesus, Mary, Joseph, holy, holy, holy . . . Lord, the girls who dare each other to kiss Fidelito, as he sits in the corner, dazed, watching birds in the frozen light.

I'm not allowed to show this picture to my daughter, either

August 12: Oliver de la Paz, "Nocturne with the Mummified Remains..."

Well, I just read that Lauren Bacall passed away.  These past two days have really sucked.  All day long, the news about Robin Williams has been playing on the television.  Every time I looked up at the screen, there was Robin Williams' face.

And now Lauren Bacall.

The poem I have from Oliver de la Paz tonight is a nocturne.  A nocturne, according to Dictionary.com, is "an artistic work appropriate to the night."  I think it's also an appropriate tone poem to read for the loss of Ms. Bacall.

I had the privilege of choosing this poem for publication in the university's literary magazine, Passages North.  It's dark, brooding, and beautiful.  I remember being breathless the first time I read it.

Saint Marty is tired of being sad.

Nocturne with the Mummified Remains of a Girl Pulled from a Bog

by Oliver de la Paz

It is a difficult thing, the skin and the skin’s new form
and how what’s missing grows large, as if the source

of something that once drew warmth had poured out,
the sack of the body, filled with sawdust and sewn up.

The knot of fingers folded into a bramble fence. Soft tissue
stiffened to the texture of a ballet slipper, and the elegant

foot, somehow gone from its housing. Here is where
the slippage of selves floats its weight into the deep swales

of summer: the nights are warm and the sphagnum hushes
every sound. Its density troubles the landscape with thatches,

pockets, small underpinnings. Indeterminacies. The bowl
at the center of the bog, deep enough to cover a man

from head to toe in sludge. And the frogs call their soft songs
to find each other in the fog. The frogs stir from deep within

the mist and confuse themselves with their sound. A singular
hum. A singular engine with the sole industry of determining

love. Love, love, they say. Their white throats fire their outbursts.
It is easy to lose yourself among the singers and the dark.

And this is how to begin—softly, the foot presses against
the wet dark peat. Softly the curses of breath rise up

from the breast bone, and to the mouth, the acidic grit of bog’s
dark jade. Into the nose, the terrible intercessions of muck

rushing past the septum into the throat and down, further down.
And from the mind, the bright lariats of holly around a table.

The faces of family, heavenward, lit by the last auroras of something,
a memory pressed against a monstrous glass. It is here

where the body resides and the skin empties its contents. The skin,
hardened into a pouch. The pouch, which was once a girl, holds

nothing but the tragedy of love. The tragedy of beautiful
breaths taken and swallowed and sung.

Just put your lips together and blow...

August 11: Poet of the Week, Oliver de la Paz, "The Fourth Madonna"

I have chosen Oliver de la Paz as the Poet of the Week.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to share a meal with Oliver at my house.  He was teaching a summer writing workshop at the university, and a friend asked if I would entertain him for the evening.  I was thrilled to eat lasagna with him and talk about kids and books and poetry.

I can honestly say that Oliver de la Paz is a true gentleman.

With the death of Robin Williams today, I need a poem that lifts my spirits, makes me happy.

Saint Marty is looking for a little grace.

The Fourth Madonna

by:  Oliver de la Paz

She's a statuette the size of a child's thumb.  The boy thinks she speaks to him.  Fidelito hides her from the television's aquarium light, fearing that she may drown the way Domingo sinks below the surface of the cathode.

She appears in the bathroom on top of the toilet's water tank to prove that she's holy, unafraid.

She has been washed in Fidelito's pant-pocket four times.  A miracle that her paint has not chipped.

She has appeared in wars with other statuettes her same size.  The green army men freeze, toppling over when they see her.

At night she swings from a string hung from the ceiling of the boy's room, circling with the propeller blade of the ceiling fan.  She blesses the room with her blue arcs.

A really great poet