December 5: A Good Son, Daughter's Fifteenth Birthday, Peter Thabit Jones, "Birthday Walk," Confessions of Saint Marty

He prayed for a good son, and when he was born named him Robert, after his adoptive father.

Ives lives for his family.  Nothing is more important to him.  His wife, Annie.  His son and daughter, Robert and Caroline.  They give his life meaning and joy.  His favorite times are going on walks with his kids, holding their hands at busy intersections.  Jumping in the car and taking day trips to upstate New York, sight-seeing and dreaming of homes with gabled roofs and gardens.  Ives starts planning for his happily-ever-after the day his son is born.

Today is my daughter's fifteenth birthday.  A decade and a half ago, at 7:29 a.m., she came screaming into this world, pink as a summer sunrise.  Up to that moment, I wasn't sure about being a father.  I thought of myself as a basically selfish person, unwilling to give up my late evenings with friends, movies every weekend, short and long trips with my wife.  No strings tying me down.

And then I held my daughter for the first time, and I felt my heart cracking open like the San Andreas Fault.  I had no idea that my life had been missing something.  She was beautiful, smiling and calm, for the most part.  I didn't mind changing her diapers.  At bath time, we would sing songs and splash each other.  Halloween was candier.  Christmas was brighter.  The world was, somehow, larger and smaller at the same time.

So, today, I celebrate my daughter.  Fifteen years young.  Dancer.  Flutist.  Singer.  Gamer.  Sulker.  Eye-roller.  Early Christmas present.  My wife will be battling the bell ringers and Christmas crowds this afternoon to finish our birthday shopping.  Tomorrow afternoon, we will have cake and ice cream after church.

Now, if Saint Marty could just get her to make her bed...

Birthday Walk

by:  Peter Thabit Jones

Walking the dazzling rim
Of the Pacific,
The Grecian-blue sea
And mythological rocks,
I feel the mortal
And sense the eternal.

I am a child
At the window of wonder,
A man spellbound
By a living prayer.

To begin
To imagine
Just one breath of God
Is to attempt
To place a tiger
On the back of an ant.

I stand and I watch
The ocean
Making love
To the humbled bay.

Confessions of Saint Marty

December 4: Softball Team, Pep Band, Peter Thabit Jones, "Elephant Seals," Off the Top of My Head

But he made it a point of telling his son, "Never take your good looks or coloring as something better."  Although many of his son's classmates at Corpus and later high school were black and Spanish-speaking kids, Ives went a step further and encouraged his son to join a Harlem baseball league.  For several years Robert had the distinction of being the only white boy, playing left field, on a softball team called the Harlem Ravens, which made it into third and fourth place in the city two years running.  He eventually had to quit because he was always getting jumped and coming home covered with bruises and with other injuries, about which he never complained but which broke his parents' hearts and tested Ives' convictions.

Among other things, Ives' story is one about the problem of race and poverty in the United States.  Ives is constantly making donations to community centers, and his wife makes a point of substitute teaching in inner-city schools, where she talks to the students about hope and the ability to rise above racial and social limitations.  The Ives family really tries to be color blind, despite the fact that their son is the target of racial violence.

But this post is not about the racial divide in the United States.  It's about sports.  I spent this evening in a high school gym, watching a basketball game.  Now that football season is over, my daughter--who plays in the school pep band--has moved indoors.  It was much more comfortable.  The bleachers were just as ass-numbing, but I did not have to contend with rain or snow or frost on my pumpkins.

My daughter's pep band sounded great.  Loud.  It felt like I was sitting inside a kettle drum.  Lots of thumping and trumpets.  By the time we left, my daughter's ears were ringing, and the kids were underneath the bleachers, combing through the garbage and doing God-knows-what else.

That's what I have for you guys tonight.  Race and basketball games and pep bands.  Tomorrow is my daughter's fifteenth birthday, so I expect lots of sulking and eye-rolling.  Maybe even some stomping and crying.

Saint Marty misses the days when his daughter was five years old.  She actually cried and stomped and sulked a lot less back then.

And now, another memory from Big Sur...

Elephant Seals
(for Carolyn and John)

by:  Peter Thabit Jones

They loll just like an unruly army,
Tired and stressed by their sea-playing day.

A colony of overweight, naked
Colonels; Mirounga augustirostris;

Living logs, oiled-up and stone-rock coloured
Blubber, they huddle like a dying herd

Of couch-size maggots.  They burp and shriek:
A strange pantomime at the ocean's edge.

Gregarious sunbathers now wind-blown;
One flicks up sand, as two others stretch high

And aggressively fawn, a ritual,
As they bite and show their salmon-pink throats.

Some check our presence with doleful eyes,
Others grossly crawl-flap to the water;

One elegantly moves through satin waves;
Several, farther out, head-bob around

Like bald men basking in holiday sun.
A weird sculpture sprawled out on the shore,

Performance art by drunken aliens,
They move and moan, an abandoned lament;

A shipwreck of creatures overlapping
Their woes, they litter the place like loafers.

Part-comic, part-tragic, they lie behind
Big Sur's fast road and the three-seeking cars.

Off the Top of My Head

December 3: The Pamphlet, The Mad Feast, Peter Thabit Jones, "Later," Off the Top of My Head

The pamphlet was resting on his lap the night he and Robert attended the lecture by its author, the two sitting in the back of an auditorium of an Upper East Side school.  The auditorium was full, the crowd largely female, divided into two general groups--rather affluent elderly women who may have had a real craving for an insight into the next world, and much younger, sharp-looking women, college students for the most part, Ives concluded...

At one point, Ives becomes a lecture junkie.  He attends any talk given by spiritualists, reincarnationists, psychic societies, and holy men.  He's searching for answers.  After a near death experience, Ives experiences a mystical vision that he doesn't understand.  Colored winds and spinning suns over Madison Avenue.  Nothing from Ives' past unlocks the meaning of the vision.  So Ives decides to explore any explanation, no matter how ridiculous. Thus, he finds himself in auditoriums, listening to presentations on astral projection and past lives and love in the hereafter.  All in pursuit of truth.

I attended a "lecture" given by a friend of mine this evening.  His new book was just released last month, so the local library invited him to read from it.  Matthew Gavin Frank and The Mad Feast.  Matt is a fantastic performer, and the room was packed.  People were lined up along the back wall. 

Matt teaches in the MFA program at the university.  He teaches graduate classes in creative nonfiction and poetry.  His books get reviewed in Entertainment Weekly and The Paris Review.  Over Christmas break, he's traveling to Greece to participate in a conference.  In the past three years, he's published three books.

It was a good night.  I saw some friends that I hadn't seen in quite a while.  I got to hear Matt tell some really good stories.  The only thing missing was a little alcohol and pizza.

Saint Marty is tired.  And hungry.  Ready for a long winter's nap.

Later

by:  Peter Thabit Jones

Later, at the table,
From a stockpile of old thoughts,
A bundle of dry words
And yesterday's dark news,
A poem catches fire.

Off the Top of My Head

December 2: You Fool, Regrets, Peter Thabit Jones, "Morning Walk"

Walking home, he had even managed to pass a local church without crossing himself, and he had made his way along the largely deserted streets feeling tremendously lonely and thinking, with the sentiment of an abandoned child, how no woman would ever really want him.  At the same time he found himself repeating in a staccato fashion, "You fool, you fool, you fool."

Ives beats himself up after his first failed attempt to connect with his future wife, Annie.  They share a moment together in an art class.  All the other students have taken a break.  Annie, the nude model for the night, admires Ives' drawings of her, and Ives cannot bring himself to ask her out.  He's tongue-tied.

Missed opportunities.  Regrets.  I have a lot of them right now.  I've sort of dug myself into a hole of grading, and I can't quite see my way out at the moment.  I'm tired (exhausted really) and angry with myself for allowing this to happen.  Yes, I've called myself a "fool" many times tonight.

That's all I have tonight.  I'm a tired fool.

Saint Marty wishes he were in a cabin in Big Sur, where his only responsibilities are writing poems and watching sunrises and sunsets.

Morning Walk

by:  Peter Thabit Jones

I stand above the sea,
Like a colossus of Greece,
The sun on my back.
I reach up and almost cup
A lone grey boat in my hand.

I had to shovel snow this morning.  I'm a fool.

December 1: Agitated Hive, Peter Thabit Jones, "Morning Mist"

When they stepped outside together, the snow was already more than six inches high and rising.  A beautiful night, the streets in every direction impassable to traffic.  Hardly anything moved save for the occasional snow plow on the avenue, bus engines whirring, strained, somewhere in the distance, little else.  To the west, over the rooftops, through the immense, agitated hive of falling snow, a kind of violet light puzzled them...

This snowy scene is the first in the book.  It's a beautiful, Norman Rockwellish moment, straight out of an Irving Berlin song.  A little later in the above paragraph, a group of kids show up, having a snowball fight.  It's one child with leukemia away from a Hallmark Hall of Fame TV special.

It rained today in my hometown.  Then it snowed.  A lot.  I was 20 miles away, and those 20 miles, in the Upper Peninsula, are like the difference between Aruba and Anchorage.  In the town where I work and teach, there were puddles and slush at the end of the day.  When I got home this evening, there were several inches of wet, heavy snow in my driveway.  The kind of snow that causes heart attacks.  Not the kind of snow that makes you dream of hearing sleigh bells with every Christmas card you write.

I spent almost 40 minutes shoveling, pushing, and stacking cold, wet, heavy precipitation.  It was like moving cement.  I swore, grunted, muttered.  At one point--as I was saying (loudly) "I hate snow!  I hate winter!"--somebody walked by, staring at me.  I didn't care.  I was d-o-n-e.

By the time I finally got inside, I was drenched in sweat and in a foul mood.  Now, after about an hour, I have calmed down.  A little.  I love Christmas.  Love Christmas stories and Christmas decorations.  One of my favorite Christmas carols is "White Christmas."  I've written an essay about that song.  When I was a kid, I prayed for snow storms.  Snow days were like gifts from God.

Now, I don't get snow days.  A snow storm means that I have to get up an hour early, to shovel my driveway.  It means treacherous driving.  It means back aches and cars in the ditch.  I have turned into an old man when it comes to snow.  I might as well hike my pants up to my armpits and start saying things like "Dag blammit!"

I am going to end this post with another Peter Thabit Jones' poem about Big Sur.  Something full of sun and summer.

Saint Marty isn't ready for winter, dag blammit.

Morning Mist

by:  Peter Thabit Jones

Big Sur smokes in a mist,
The ocean has gone
For a few strange hours,
Until the ancient shroud
Drift, magically lifts,
And the bay glistens
And boils in the sun.

(Sorry--no cartoon tonight.  Blogger is not cooperating.  Please lodge any complaints with the staff of Blogger.  Dag blammit.)

November 30: Poet of the Week, Peter Thabit Jones, "Afternoon in May," "Ives" Dip, Off the Top of My Head

The Poet of the Week is Peter Thabit Jones.

I only recently found his collection, Poems From a Cabin on Big Sur, in a bag of books given to me by a friend.  I was immediately drawn to the title because I had the good fortune of spending five days in Big Sur, writing poetry with poet Sharon Olds.  That week seems like a dream now.  Ocean waves crashing all day and night.  A fat moon swimming in stars.  Sulfur baths.  And poetry.  A lot of poetry.

Thabit Jones spend a month in a cabin in Big Sur as a poet-in-residence.  His book is filled with the poems he wrote during that time, and they really capture the rugged simplicity and beauty of the area.  The first poem, especially, reminds me of the afternoons I spent standing on a cliff's edge, searching the Pacific for signs of a whale (I never saw one):

Afternoon in May

by:  Peter Thabit Jones

A whale?  Basking shark?
Something like a supple log,
The colour of rock,
Brownish, greyish, trawls its way
Through the Big Sur waves.
Seen, unseen, then seen, unseen.

I can almost smell the salt air reading that poem, and I can see the sea otters playing in the beds of brown kelp breathing on the waves.

Yes, on this first day back at work, I am being nostalgic for an experience that still fills me with great pleasure.  For five days, I didn't have to worry about work or teaching or money or car problems.  I woke in the morning, got dressed, and went for a walk.  I'd find a bench somewhere, pull out my journal, and start writing.  Breakfast.  Then more poetry.  Talking with Sharon.  Lunch.  Another walk.  More poetry.  Talking with Sharon.  Dinner.  More poetry.  All my days had this wonderful rhythm.  I felt like a real writer for a brief time in my life.

And, on this last day of the month of giving thanks, I am grateful for the gift of writing in my life.  The gift of poetry.  I am able to put words down on a page and have those words mean something to other people.  That is a great, great gift that God has given me.

My Ives dip question is this:

Will I ever feel like a real writer again?

The phonograph music would fill the living room, and she would find her head turning and digging deep into the easy-chair headrest in rhythm to the beat, as if she were a 1940s bobby-soxer, and she would daydream about the time when Robert had used their living room as a rehearsal studio for a kind of jazz group he put together with kids from the neighborhood.  Some knew what they were doing, others didn't, and the neighbors knew it too.  During those sessions he played a snare drum with brushes and foot-tapped a high hat and felt so honored, so formal about jazz, despite his ecclesiastical training, that he used to shine his penny loafers and put on a tie before playing.

Ives' son, Robert, feels like a real jazz musician in the above passage.  He dresses the part.  Jams with some of his friends.  He commits himself fully to the formal study of jazz.  He's not an amateur.  He's a serious student.

I have committed myself for over twenty years to the study, teaching, and practice of creative writing.  Maybe that makes me a real writer.

Or maybe that makes Saint Marty a complete idiot.

Off the Top of My Head