January 2, 2025: "Photograph of the Girl," Good Friend's Brother, "Blue Ball"

I spent some time this morning scrolling through the pictures in my phone.  (Confession:  I'm terrible at organizing my photos.  It's just one big string of images in chronological order--no neatly-labeled folders for me.)  Of course, with each snapshot comes a flood of memories--smells, tastes, sounds.  Old friends.  New friends  Christmases past and present.  Loved ones here.  Loved ones gone. 

Sharon Olds studies a picture . . .

Photograph of the Girl

by: Sharon Olds

The girl sits on the hard ground,
the dry pan of Russia, in the drought
of 1921, stunned,
eyes closed, mouth open,
raw hot wind blowing
sand in her face. Hunger and puberty are
taking her together. She leans on a sack,
layers of clothes fluttering in the heat,
the new radius of her arm curved.
She cannot be not beautiful, but she is
starving. Each day she grows thinner, and her bones
grow longer, porous. The caption says
she is going to starve to death that winter
with millions of others. Deep in her body
the ovaries let out her first eggs,
golden as drops of grain.

As Olds' poem demonstrates, a photo can tell a story.  A young Russian girl during a famine, her body full of the promise of womanhood.  Of course, that promise remains unfulfilled.  Instead, she disappears with millions of others during a winter of hunger and starvation.  

Tonight, a good friend reached out to me with the news that her younger brother passed today.  Of course, she's lost, wandering around her apartment, not really sure what to do with herself.  I've been in the same situation a few times, and it takes a while to feel normal again.  Because you have to redefine what "normal" is.  

My friend lives quite a distance away, so I have no way to physically comfort her.  All I can offer are empty words (because all words are empty in the face of such loss) and a conversation about Woody Woodpecker and Marvin the Martian.  Nothing is going to replace her longing to hear her brother's voice right now.  

Tonight or tomorrow, my friend will probably start scrolling through pictures on her phone or in family albums.  It's natural--a way to resurrect someone you've lost.  Like the Russian girl Olds raises from the dead after 102 years.  

My friend will experience these small Lazarus moments a lot over the next few days/weeks/months.  Even years.  I still see my dad walking into church on Saturday evenings even though he's been gone since 2018.  My sister, Sally, is a constant presence in my life.

Please keep Saint Marty's friend in your thoughts in the coming days.  The dead stick with the living for quite a long time.

Today, in The Daily Poet, the prompt was this:  On this date in 1929, a document was signed between the U.S. ad Canada, protecting Niagara Falls from construction.  Write a poem about something you want to protect.  It can be a relationship, a memory, something in nature, or something in or about yourself.  If this is a first person poem, allow the speaker to be vulnerable.

Blue Ball

by: Martin Achatz

In the picture, you hold a blue ball

in your jaws, your spaniel ears

golden and long, eyes bright,

expectant, as if you want me

to reach through 20 years, snatch

the ball away, send it bouncing

across the living room floor, 

the bell inside its rubber shell

jingling like a harness bell

on a horse at full gallop through

a snowy, Robert Frost woods.

I hold the photo, pinched between

pointer and thumb, as if it's made

of crystal so thin a breath would

shatter it.  I can still hear the low

rumble in your chest, feel the steam

of your lungs on my palm.  Oh,

old friend, gone these many years,

I wonder if, in your last days,

a squirrel memory of me darted

through the pine trees of your mind,

you wanting to chase it with fury,

the coiled spring of your body

so tight your paws don't even touch

the earth as you run.  I hold onto

this hope, this precious blue thing--

somewhere, somehow you're still

running, my voice in your ears, calling

Fetch, boy, fetch!

March 8: Gratitude Number Four, a Friend, Sharon Olds, "Photograph of the Girl," New Cartoon

Yeah, I know the title to this post is really long, but I have to include a lot of material today.  I have to talk about Charlotte's Web and do my next Lenten gratitude post.  I also have to include a poem, since it's Saturday, and, finally, there's a new Confessions of Saint Marty cartoon.  I'm going to try to do all of this quickly, because I'm tired.

So, first let me share this little passage from E. B. White's book:

...You can imagine Wilbur's surprise when, out of the darkness, came a small voice he had never heard before.  It sounded rather thin, but pleasant.  "Do you want a friend, Wilbur?" it said.  "I'll be a friend to you.  I've watched you all day and I like you."

Charlotte is, more than anything else, a good friend.  She cares deeply for Wilbur, and she spends most of her life trying to save her friend from a untimely end in Zuckerman's smokehouse.  Charlotte is self-sacrificing, generous, and loving.

We have a neighbor who has many of Charlotte's qualities.  He watches over our house, loves talking to our five-year-old son.  Even if he's busy painting his garage, he'll stop what he's doing to yell out a greeting to us.  He's a really decent man.

This morning, my wife and I were shoveling our driveway.  The snow caught me by surprise.  I didn't watch the weather forecast last night, so, when I stepped outside, the new layer of white made me swear under my breath.  I dragged out my shovel and started clearing it away.  My neighbor was in his driveway with his snowblower, doing the same thing.

The next thing I knew, he was standing by my wife, talking to her.  Then, he called out for me to move my car, and he brought his snowblower over and cleared our driveway and front yard.  He saved us a good half hour's worth of labor.

That's what I'm grateful for this evening.  A good, kind neighbor.

As for today's poem, I'm falling back on Sharon Olds, one of my favorite writers.  This poem comes from her early collection The Dead and the Living:

Photograph of the Girl

The girl sits on the hard ground,
the dry pan of Russia, in the drought
of 1911, stunned,
eyes closed, mouth open,
raw hot wind blowing
sand in her face.  Hunger and puberty are
taking her together.  She leans on a sack,
layers of clothes fluttering in the heat,
the new radius of her arm curved.
She cannot be not beautiful, but she is
starving.  Each day she grows thinner, and her bones
grow longer, porous.  The caption says
she is going to starve to death that winter
with millions of others.  Deep in her body
the ovaries let out her first eggs,
golden as drops of grain.

That's the kind of poem that makes me want to give up writing poetry because it's so beautiful, so perfect.

But it also inspires Saint Marty to be a better poet, the way Saint Marty's neighbor inspires him to be a better person.

Confessions of Saint Marty

November 24: Haunted, Good Reads, "The Dead and the Living," New Cartoon

"You will be haunted," resumed the Ghost, "by Three Spirits."

Scrooge is a haunted man.  He's haunted by his past.  He's haunted by his present.  He's haunted by his future.  He's haunted by his dead sister, Fan.  He's haunted by his lost love, Belle.  He's haunted by beggars and debtors, a whole army of the poor and destitute.  Scrooge has so many ghosts in his life that Marley and the Christmas Spirits are small potatoes, just four in a long line of specters.

The good read I'm going to tell you about today is my favorite collection of poems.  It's the book that made me decide to become a poet.  It's full of ghosts, from the poet's past, present, and future.  There are hosts of children and mothers, fathers and lovers.  There are ghosts of race riots and Marilyn Monroe.  It is one of the most haunted books I have ever read.

The book I'm talking about is Sharon Olds' The Dead and the Living, which won the 1984 National Book Critics' Circle Award for Poetry.  I first read this collection around 1990 or 1991, when I was a graduate student in college.  At the time, I was finishing my Master's in fiction writing, dreaming of being the next John Irving or Raymond Carver.  And then I took a class in Contemporary American Poetry, where I ran into this:

Photograph of the Girl

The girl sits on the hard ground,
the dry pan of Russia, in the drought
of 1921, stunned,
eyes closed, mouth open,
raw hot wind blowing
sand in her face.  Hunger and puberty are
taking her together.  She leans on a sack,
layers of clothes fluttering in the heat,
the new radius of her arm curved.
She cannot be not beautiful, but she is
starving.   Each day she grows thinner, and her bones
grow longer, porous.  The caption says
she is going to starve to death that winter
with millions of others.  Deep in her body
the ovaries let out her first eggs,
golden as drops of grain.

That is Sharon Olds.  She left me stunned, breathless.  I wanted to read more of her.  Each of her poems taught me something about myself and the kind of writer I wanted to be.  In a weird way, I wanted to be Sharon Olds, the way I wanted to be J. D. Salinger when I was a teenager.  Great writers do that to me.  The make me want to be better than I am.  I admired the raw honesty of Olds' poetry.  She didn't shy away from painful or private subjects.  She dissected them, in all their physical complexity.  The girl in the poem above is dying, and yet, within her body, is the golden promise of new life.  The juxtaposition of these two images is thrilling and heartbreaking.

About fifteen years after I first encountered Sharon Olds on the page, I had the privilege of attending a week-long writing workshop taught by her.  Every morning and afternoon, for two hours, I sat in a circle of poets and listened to Olds speak about the hard work of poetry.  She was the den mother to our group of Girl Scout poets.  It was one of the best writing experiences I have ever had.

I brought my copy of The Dead and the Living to that workshop with me.  At the end of our five days, I asked her to autograph it for me.  She didn't write anything special or earth-shattering in it.  It was a standard kind of autograph, "For Marty, with warm best wishes from Sharon, Big Sur, May 2005."  But it is proof that I met her, that she read my poetry and, for five days, knew who I was.

The Dead and the Living still haunts me.  Ghosts from my past and present haunt its pages.  I still want to be Sharon Olds.  I want her courage in choosing subject matter.  I want her gift of image and free association.  I want her ability to constantly surprise with each and every line of poetry she writes.

Saint Marty is going to let Sharon Olds have the last word tonight.

Blue Son

All day with my blue son,
sick again, the blue skin
under his eyes, blue tracing of his
veins over the bones of his chest
pronounced as the ribs of the dead, a green
vein in his groin, blue-green as the
numbers on an arm.  His eloquent face
grows thinner each hour, the germs use him
like a soap.  Exhaustion strips him, and under each
layer of sweetness a deeper layer of
sweetness is bared.  His white skin,
so fine it has no grain, goes blue-
grey, and the burning blue of his eye
dies down and goes out, it is the faded cobalt on the
side of a dead bird.  He seems to
withdraw to a great distance, as if he is
gone and looking back at me
without regret, patient, like an old
man who just dug his grave and
waits at the edge, in the evening light,
naked, blue with cold, in terrible
obedience.

Confessions of Saint Marty