August 21: "Paris," Helen, "The Path to Joy"

Today is the two-year anniversary of the passing of one of my best friends, Helen.  

It's hard to say all the things I've been feeling today, from sadness to happiness, joy to grief.  Helen was a force for goodness in the world.  I don't say that about a whole lot of people, but it truly does apply to her.  Through her Joy Center, a beautiful artist retreat she owned and ran, Helen fostered creativity, mindfulness, art, music, film, food--anything that incited laughter and friendship.

Helen was in my life for over 30 years.  We went to graduate school together.  She was an amazing writer and poet.  Many an afternoon at the university, we sat in her office or mine and wrote.  We traveled to Stratford, Ontario, one summer to attend the Shakespeare Festival.  Went to a conference together to do presentations on poetics for a discussion panel.  When I was named U.P. Poet Laureate, Helen was one of the first people to ask me to do a poetry reading.  She lifted me up through some very dark times in my life.  

The word that came to my mind this morning when I was thinking about Helen was "hope."  A lot of people think of hope as kind of an empty thing.  I hope to win the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry or the Nobel Prize in Literature.  I hope to live until I'm 115 years old.  I hope I win the lottery.  You see what I mean?  Hope can be used to foster a lot of unrealistic expectations.  

For Helen, though, hope was as real and palpable as wild raspberries or sea-salt caramels.  She believed the best in people.  When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, she and I shared several days of darkness.  Then, she sent me a text message saying that she was going to stop being so . . . doomsday.  Instead, Helen chose to hold onto the idea that everything little thing was going to be alright.  (Cue Bob Marley.)  Yes, she even tried to believe there was goodness in that dumpster fire of a President.  Helen was the living embodiment of hope.

Billy Collins finds hope in Paris . . . 

Paris

by: Billy Collins

In the apartment someone gave me, 

the bathroom looked out on a little garden 

at the bottom of and air shaft 

with a few barely sprouting trees, 

ivy clinging to the white cinder blocks, 

a blue metal table and a rusted chair 

where, it would seem, no one had ever sat. 

Every morning, a noisy bird 

would flutter down between the buildings, 

perch on a thin branch and yell at me 

in French bird-talk 

while I soaked in the tub 

under the light from the pale translucent ceiling. 

And while he carried on, I would lie there 

in the warm soapy water 

wondering what shirt I would put on that day, 

what zinc-covered bar I would stand at 

with my Herald-Tribune and a cup of strong coffee. 

After a lot of squawking, he would fly 

back into the sky leaving only the sound 

of a metal store-front being raised 

or a scooter zipping by outside, 

which was my signal 

to stand up in the cloudy water 

and reach for a towel, 

time to start concentrating on which way 

I would turn after I had locked the front door, 

what shop signs I would see, 

what bridges I would lean on 

to watch the broad river undulating 

like a long-playing record under the needle of my eye. 

Time to stand dripping wet and wonder 

about the hordes of people 

I would pass in the street, mostly people 

whose existence I did not believe in, 

but a few whom I would glance at 

and see my whole life 

the way you see the ocean from the shore. 

One morning after another, 

I would fan myself dry with a towel 

and wonder about what paintings 

I would stand before that day, 

looking forward to the usual — 

the sumptuous reclining nudes, 

the knife next to a wedge of cheese, 

a landscape with pale blue mountains, 

the heads and shoulders of gods 

struggling with one another, 

a foot crushing a snake — 

but always hopeful for something new 

like yesterday’s white turkeys in a field 

or a single stalk of asparagus on a plate 

in a small gilded frame, 

always ready, now that I am dressed, 

to cheer the boats of the beautiful, 

the boats of the strange, 

as they float down the river of this momentous day.

Helen faced life like Collins does in this poem.  She got up, got dressed, and headed out into the world to cheer the boats of the beautiful and strange.  Every day was momentous for her, and she taught me how to chase momentousness every time I was in her company.

Occasionally now, I hear a beautiful bird singing or see a beautiful wildflower, and I know Helen is with me.  If there are guardian angels in the universe, she is one of them, looking out for us all, making everything so much brighter.

Saint Marty lifts up his friend, Helen, today.  She was a true force of joyful chaos and love.

A poem I wrote for Helen's celebration of life . . . 

The Path to Joy

by: Martin Achatz

for Helen

“The path to joy, like with sadness, did not lead away from suffering and adversity, but through it.”
          --the Dalai Lama

I have tried, Helen, tried
in these days since you called
me to say “I’m ready” and “I’ll be
with you always,” yes, I have
tried to find that path you walked
every day, the one that took you
by Penis Pond in frozen January
where two middle school girls
on snowshoes stamped out
the shape of an erect penis
in fresh snow on lake ice
for a month straight, and that
brought you joy, day after day.
Then there was the Heritage Trail
path where you found
handfuls of ripe raspberries,
crammed them in your mouth,
let their juice spill down
your chin, stain your lips
the color of cardinal wings, and that
brought you joy, day after day.
Or that path to a cove in Maine
where oyster shells flashed, seaweed
and salt filled your lungs
with the breath of whales, and that
brought you joy, day after day.
How about that path up Croagh Patrick
in County Mayo, where you found
a sacred stone emblazoned with
the image of Bigfoot, and that
brought you joy, day after day.
So many paths, through mountains
in Spain, along beaches in Greece.
India. Scotland. Idaho. Superior. Atlantic.
Pacific. Aegean. Rushmore and Eiffel.
Joy and joy and joy and joy and joy.
Longitudes of it. Latitudes of it.
Your compass always pointed Due
Joy. So this is where you have led
me tonight, Helen—to a poem
where I have used the word joy
ten times already—because tears
are full of oceans, and grief tastes
like kumquats, a nova of sour
on the tongue, then sweetness
returning, the way you always
did, clicking your heels together
three times, saying over and over,
There’s no place like joy.
There’s no place like joy.
There’s no place like joy.

 

April 25: Utopian Strain, a Writer, Dreams

Merton has a conversation with his aunt about the future . . .

Now that I as going to go to school in England, I would be more and more under her wing.  In fact, I had barely landed when she took me on one of those shopping expeditions in Oxford Street that was the immediate prelude to Ripley Court--a school in Surrey which was now in the hands of her sister-in-law, Mrs. Pearce, the wife of Uncle Ben's late brother, Robert.  He had been killed in a cycling accident when, coming to the bottom of a hill, he had failed to turn the corner and had run straight into a brick wall.  His brakes had gone back on him halfway down.

It was on one of those mornings in Oxford Street, perhaps not the very first one, that Aunt Maud and I had a great conversation about my future.  We had just bought me several pairs of grey flannel trousers and a sweater and some shoes and some grey flannel shirts and one of those floppy flannel hats that English children have to wear, and now, having emerged from D. H Evans, were riding down Oxford Street on the top of an open bus, right up in the front, where one could see simply everything

"I wonder if Tom has thought at all about his future," Aunt Maud said and looked at me, winking and blinking with both eyes as a sign of encouragement.  I was Tom.  She sometimes addressed you in the third person, like that, perhaps as a sign of some delicate, inward diffidence about bringing the matter up at all.

I admitted that I had though a little about the future, and what I wanted to be.  But I rather hesitated to tell her that I wanted to be a novelist.

"Do you think writing would be a good profession for anyone?" I said tentatively.

"Yes indeed, writing is a very fine profession!  But what kind of writing would you like to do?"

"I have been thinking that I might write stories," I said.

"I imagine you would probably do quite well at that, some day," said Aunt Maud, kindly, but added:  "Of course, you know that writers sometimes find it very difficult to make their way in the world."

"Yes, I realize that," I said reflectively.

"Perhaps if you had some other occupation, as a means of making a living, you might find time to write in your spare moments.  Novelists sometimes get their start that way, you know."

"I might be a journalist," I suggested, "and write for the newspapers."

"Perhaps that is a good idea," she said.  "A knowledge of languages would be very valuable in that field, too.  You could work your way up to the position of foreign correspondent."

"And I could write books in my spare time."

"Yes, I suppose you probably could manage it that way."

I think we rode all the way out to Ealing, talking in this somewhat abstract and utopian strain, and finally we got off, and crossed Haven Green to Castlebar Road where we had to stop in at Durston House for something or other.

It's a simple enough conversation.  An adult asking a child what s/he wants to be when s/he grows up.  Everyone reading this post probably had similar conversations with a parent or teacher or counselor or priest or minister or whomever.  "What do you want to be when you grow up?" asks the visiting police officer.  "A police officer!" says I.  "What do you want to be when you grow up, my son?" says my parish priest.  "A priest!" says I.  "What do you want to be when you grow up?" says my mother.  "A writer?" says I timidly.  My mother clucks her tongue, "Well, you can take English classes, but how about computers?  There's a future in that."  Thus I began my college career, on a full-ride scholarship, as a Computer Science major.

That didn't quite work out the way my mother imagined.  Do I regret the twists and turns my life took on the way to my current situation?  I suppose I would make different choices given the opportunity.  Maybe finish my PhD in literature.  Maybe hole up in a bedroom of the first apartment my wife and I had, banging away on a computer, writing my first novel.  Maybe forgo college entirely and travel, visiting the places I've always dreamed of seeing and now probably never will.  Rome.  London.  Paris.  Florence.  Beijing.

A side effect of this pandemic, for me, is all the time I have now to think about things like this.  My future, at the moment, is pretty hemmed in by financial and parental obligations.  I have bills to figure out how to pay and a family to support on a greatly reduced income.  I won't be planning trips to Greece or Madrid or even Green Bay any time soon.  Instead, I will hammer away on some blog post for an hour or so, publish it, and then move on to grading and making a spinach artichoke bomb.  The blogging keeps my dream alive, and the bomb feeds my kids and wife.  Some things don't change.

So, go ahead.  Ask me what I want to be when I grow up.

Saint Marty's answer will probably still be, "A writer."

March 4: A Kind of Longing, Burning of Notre Dame, Love for a Friend

Merton falling in love with spires and steeples and stained glass . . .

"All the year round they live on bread and vegetables and bits of sausage," Father explained, "so now they don't want anything but meat."  And I supposed he had the right explanation.  But before the meal was half over, I got up from the table and staggered out into the air, and leaned against the wall of the barn, and watched the huge, belligerent geese parading up and down the barn-yard, dragging their tremendous overstuffed livers in the dirt, those livers which would soon be turned into the kind of pate de foie gras which even now made me sick.  

The feast lasted until late in the afternoon, and even when night fell some were still at it there in the barn.  But meanwhile the owner of the farm and Pierrot and Father and I had gone out to see an old abandoned chapel that stood on the property.  I wonder what it had been:  a shrine, a hermitage perhaps?  But now, in any case, it was in ruins.  And it had a beautiful thirteenth- or fourteenth-century window, empty of course of its glass.  Father bought the whole thing, with some of the money he had saved up from his last exhibition, and we eventually used the stones and the window and the door-arches and so on in building our house at St. Antonin.

By the time the summer of 1926 came around, we were well established in St. Antonin, although work on the house had not yet really begun.  By this time I had learned French, or all the French that a boy of eleven was expected to use in the ordinary course of his existence, and I remember how I had spent hours that winter reading books about all the other wonderful places there were in France.

Pop had sent us money, at Christmas, and we used some of it to buy a big expensive three volume set of books, full of pictures, called Le Pays de France.  And I shall never forget the fascination with which I studied it, and filled my mind with those cathedrals and ancient abbeys and those castles and towns and monuments of the culture that had so captivated my heart.

I remember how I looked at the ruins of Jumieges and Cluny, and wondered how those immense basilicas had looked in the days of their glory.  Then there was Chartres, with its two unequal spires; the long vast nave of Bourges, the soaring choir of Beauvais; the strange fat romanesque cathedral of Angouleme, and the white byzantine domes of Perigueux.  And I gazed upon the huddled buildings of the ancient Grande Chartreuse, crowded together in their solitary valley, with the high mountains loaded with firs, soaring up to their rocky summits on either side.  What kind of men had lived in those cells?  I cannot say that I wondered much about that, as I looked at the pictures.  I had no curiosity about monastic vocations or religious rules, but I know my heart was filled with a kind of longing to breathe the air of that lonely valley and to listen to its silence.  I wanted to be in all these places, which the pictures of Le Pays de France showed me: indeed, it was kind of a problem to me and an unconscious source of obscure and half- realized woe, that I could not be in all of them at once.

Reading this passage, I'm reminded of the day Notre Dame in Paris burned.  It was a place that had been on my bucket list.  One day, I told myself, I will walk into that place and be surrounded by almost 857 years of prayers and candles and art.  I remember imagining how it would smell--old wood mixed with incense mixed with wax mixed with something else.  Holiness?  Grace?  The ghosts of thousands and thousands of pilgrims?

Sadly, now, in my lifetime, I will never get that experience.  Notre Dame took 182 years to build.  It will probably take more years than I have left on this planet to restore it to something like its former glory.  I accept that.  Perhaps, one day, I will be able to stand outside what remains of Notre Dame in the future.  Maybe I'll still be able to smell the smoke and char of the fire.  See soot still clinging to the surrounding buildings.

I have always been drawn to places of worship--Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, Jewish, Quaker, Muslim.  I love that attempt by human beings to create something that somehow touches the face of the Divine.  The ornateness of cathedrals.  The spartan simplicity of meeting houses.  I think almost any artistic endeavor--whether its cathedral building or portrait painting or poem writing--is an act akin to praying.  Art is the way we grapple with the human condition in all of its beauty and ugliness.

I haven't written a new poem in a while.  Coincidentally (or not), my prayer life has dwindled to nonexistent, as well.  I feel out of touch with God right now.  Like God has stepped away and left me to struggle alone.  I know that's not true.  God doesn't do that.  However, over the past year or so, I've experienced quite a few dark nights of the soul.  Sometimes these nights can produce some good poems.  Other times, like now, I can barely string words together for a daily blog post.

Tonight, it feels like Notre Dame is burning again.  Worry has plagued me, and, when that happens, I don't accomplish a while lot.  Instead, I go to bed, pull the blankets over my head, and just . . . sleep.  It's the only time when my mind calms down.

No poems tonight.  Too tired.  The one act of cathedral building I can do--sending out some love and prayers for one of my best friends who lost her puppy of 13 years yesterday.

Saint Marty loves you, Missy.  Please know that.  See that love, like the candles of Notre Dame, filling your darkness with light.

August 23: Sunset at Stonehenge, Justin Runge, "Travelogue"

Today, I talked to someone who recently returned from a three-week-long trip to Europe.  For one of those weeks, he stayed in Paris and walked to a local candy shop every day to buy fresh chocolates.  He also shared pictures of sunset or sunrise at Stonehenge.  I don't remember which it was, and does it really matter?

I have been to Hawaii once.  Florida a couple of times.  New York City twice.  Big Sur for a week-long poetry workshop with Sharon Olds.  I've seen a California beach carpeted with manatees.  Stood on the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, watching the oil still leaking from the wreckage below.

I guess I've seen some pretty amazing things in my life.  No, I haven't been to Stonehenge or climbed the Eiffel Tower.  Or heard the thunder of Niagara Falls.  Maybe I will.  Some day.

That's Saint Marty's travelogue for this evening.

Travelogue

by:  Justin Runge

The boy
waving
at the train
did not
realize he was
waving at me.
Koi-colored
traffic cones
in the river.
How many
know fowl
go underwater
for a second.
Or know,
but forget.
Ornate tattoo
on the small
of the pregnant
woman’s back
says Beautiful.
I am trying
to keep this
poem on Earth.
The train stops
on a part of it
long enough
that I see rust
and we begin to.
Welcome to
Vancouver.

November 13: Bewildered Expression, Paris, D. H. Melhem, "41," Off the Top of My Head

And then Ives blinked and found himself standing on the sidewalk beside his wife, across the street from the Church of the Ascension.  On the pavement, just by his feet, was a large piece of canvas, and under it a body, stretched out.  Then the officer lifted off the canvas and shined a flashlight onto the face to reveal the shocked and bewildered expression of his son.

This is the moment when Ives' entire life shifts.  The police officer lifts that piece of canvas, and Ives stares down at his new life.  A life defined by tragedy and loss.  He's no longer going to be the father of a future priest.  Forever more, Ives will be a grieving parent, victim of violence, symbol of tragedy.

This evening. I spend almost two hours watching the news reports about the terrorist attacks in Paris.  So much confusion and fear.  Over 140 people killed in six separate attacks.  The entire country of France shut down as the police and military try to restore peace.

As I sat watching the same images over and over, listening to the news anchors saying the same things over and over, I couldn't help but remember September 11.  How I spent the day glued to the television, watching the World Trade Center towers fall again and again.  And the panic.  Cars lined up at the gas stations because of a rumor about skyrocketing prices.  All airplanes grounded.  Everyone was waiting for the next tragedy to happen.

I'm sure, in the coming days, the networks are going to be full of stories about the victims and survivors.  There will be wild speculation over who is responsible.  Tomorrow, I'm sure, names will start coming out.  A long ticker tape of the innocent.

In light of these events, I find myself struggling to find something about which to be thankful tonight.  I am thankful that my wife and kids are safe.  I'm thankful that I live in a place that's remote, protected.  Not that I think that I'm immune to tragedy in the Upper Peninsula.  I'm not.  But I don't have to worry about soldiers patrolling the streets of my hometown, toting automatic weapons.  My kids don't have to walk through metal detectors at school.  Most of my neighbors don't even lock their front doors at night.

Tomorrow, I will go to McDonald's for breakfast with my family.  In the afternoon, I will put up my Christmas tree with my daughter.  I will attend church in the afternoon and get pizza for dinner afterward.  Tomorrow night, I may watch It's a Wonderful Life.  My life is not a fairy tale, but I am, for the most part, happy.  Safe.

Saint Marty is living happily ever after.

41. (from Country:  an Organic Poem)

by:  D. H. Melhem

Education is out there,
                                        in the street, man--

I told you of the Beast, and Beauty, and that the Beast was how he saw himself, and was treated, although the handsome Prince within his skin was the virtue of his soul, and how Beauty approached with a single candle flickering away the dark to disclose the perfection of his blackness, and the drops of white tallow that burned him awake to his death by the stream where Beauty followed, and her tears upon him as she cried, "Ma Bete!"  And beneath those tears the loving Prince of his desire rose to embrace her as they were received by the stream that grew everywhere into its pervasive tributaries, nourishing the dessicated land.  And I wept, that the joyful Prince could not speak in you, that you feared and raged along the banks of your spirit, that you could feel upon your skin, as yet, only the tallow . . .

Off the Top of My Head