July 21: Flurry of Packing, Sandra Beasley, "Love Poem for Wednesday"

Tonight, when I get home, my wife will be in a flurry of packing.  Washing clothes.  Making lists.  Every once in a while asking me a question that she already has the answer to, like "Do you think I should pack two or three cans of Pringles?"  (If you're interested, my answer is always, "Please don't over pack for this trip like you do for every trip we take.")  My wife likes to prepare for every contingency, including a world-wide Pringles shortage and the extermination of humankind by a killer meteor.

I will attempt to help, but, ultimately, I will fail.  My wife is very serious about packing and preparing.  I am a little less strict.  As long as I have my insulin, a book, my journals, a fountain pen, and clean underwear, I'm pretty much all set.

It's Thursday night.  I don't have to work tomorrow.  It's the start of my long weekend.  Long drive ahead of me.  Five or six hours.  I don't really like long car trips, but I like being some place different.  I loved Waikiki and Big Sur and the Wisconsin Dells.  Some day, I want to visit Italy, Rome in particular.  Maybe it will happen.

I have a poem tonight from Sandra Beasley about Wednesdays.  It's a good poem.  A poem I wish I'd written.  I will be packing my laptop for this trip.  Doing some remote posts.  Maybe I'll write a love poem for Friday or Saturday.

Who knows?  Marty may end up as a Saint of the Week on some writer's blog.

Love Poem for Wednesday

by:  Sandra Beasley

You’re the day after Tuesday, before eternity.
You’re the day we ran out of tomatoes
and used tiny packets of ketchup instead.

You are salt, no salt, too much salt, a hangover.
You hold the breath of an abandoned cave.
Sometimes you surprise me with your

aurora borealis and I’ll pull over to watch you;
I’ll wait in the dark shivering fields of you.
But mostly, not. My students don’t care for you

or your lessons from the life of a minor god.
Can you hit the high C in our anthem?
Can you bench press a national disaster?

I fear for you, Wednesday. Your papers
are never in order. Your boots track in mud.
You’re the day I realized I didn’t even like him,

and the day I still said yes, yes, yes.
Sometimes I think you and I should elope,
and leave this house of cards to shuffle itself.

You are love, no love, too much love, a cuckold.
You are the loneliest of the three bears, hoping
to come home and find someone in your bed.

July 18: Republican Convention, Poet of the Week, Sandra Beasley, "Let Me Count the Waves"

On this, the first day of the Republican convention in Cleveland where a political party is going to nominate an actual caricature for President of the United States, I had to find a Poet of the Week who made me laugh.  I found Sandra Beasley, thanks to Rita Dove who named her as a young poet to watch.

What you will read below is a sestina.  Notice the words repeating in a pattern.  Notice how Beasley stretches the lines and words in places.  Plus, she talks about Pringles.  What more could you want in a poem?

Saint Marty is going to try to avoid political talk this week.  He'll let the idiot in Cleveland speak for himself and offend as many people as possible.

Let Me Count the Waves

by:  Sandra Beasley

We must not look for poetry in poems.
                  —Donald Revell 

You must not skirt the issue wearing skirts.

You must not duck the bullet using ducks.

You must not face the music with your face.

Headbutting, don’t use your head. Or your butt.

You must not use a house to build a home,

and never look for poetry in poems.

In fact, inject giraffes into your poems.

Let loose the circus monkeys in their skirts.

Explain the nest of wood is not a home

at all, but a blind for shooting wild ducks.

Grab the shotgun by its metrical butt;

aim at your Muse’s quacking, Pringled face.

It’s good we’re talking like this, face to face.

There should be more headbutting over poems.

Citing an 80s brand has its cost but

honors the teenage me, always in skirts,

showing my sister how to Be the Duck

with a potato-chip beak. Take me home,

Mr. Revell. Or make yourself at home

in my postbellum, Reconstruction face—

my gray eyes, my rebel ears, all my ducks

in the row of a defeated mouth. Poems

were once civil. But war has torn my skirts

off at the first ruffle, baring my butt

or as termed in verse, my luminous butt.

Whitman once made a hospital his home.

Emily built a prison of her skirts.

Tigers roamed the sad veldt of Stevens’s face.

That was the old landscape. All the new poems

map the two dimensions of cartoon ducks.

We’re young and green. We’re braces of mallards,

not barrels of fish. Shoot if you must but

Donald, we’re with you. Trying to save poems,

we settle and frame their ramshackle homes.

What is form? Turning art to artifice,

trading pelts for a more durable skirt.

Even urban ducklings deserve a home.

Make way. In the modern: Make way, Buttface.

A poem is coming through, lifting her skirt.

Better than anything that's going on in Cleveland

April 22: Pagan Stars, Earth Day, Neanderthal

Later I lay half out of my sleeping bag on a narrow shelf of flat ground between the cottage porch and the bank to the dam.  I lay where a flash flood would reach me, but we have had a flood; the time is late.  The night was clear; when the fretwork of overhead foliage rustled and parted, I could see the pagan stars.

Dillard is camping out.  In the darkness, she listens to the sound of the trees and trees' inhabitants.  Goldfinches.  A squirrel or two.  And cicadas, "the guns of August."  Night is not a time of rest in the woods.  It's a time of movement, scavenging, and noise.  Lots of noise.  Nature's stage is never empty.  The actors simply change with the sunlight and season.  Earth is in perpetual performance.

Happy Earth Day!  In celebration of this important event, I spent nine hours inside, sitting before a computer, answering phones, and dealing with people.  The closest I came to being environmentally conscious was taking the stairs instead of the elevator when I left work.  (I work on the third floor of a medical center; there was no way I was going to walk up three flights of stairs this morning. )

When my alarm went off this morning, I looked out the window and saw snow flying.  I had to scrape ice off my windshield.  I did not think or say very kind things about Mother Earth as I zipped up my winter jacket yet again.  It was dark and windy.

Now, I don't want to hear any lectures about global warming and the melting polar icecap.  I know that we have messed up this little piece of rock in the solar system we call home.  Human beings have a way of discovering natural things like crude oil or natural gas and going all apeshit over it.  I'm reminded of the scene from the beginning of 2001:  A Space Odyssey where one Neanderthal clubs another Neanderthal to death over a pool of muddy water.  We haven't progressed all that much from that prehistoric moment. 

So, tonight, I will do something green.  Maybe I'll return the bag of pop cans on my front porch.  Or go for a walk.  Turn off all the lights in my house and read by candlelight.  (I thought about going natural this morning by forgoing deodorant, but I didn't want to offend my coworkers--two twenty-something girls who wouldn't appreciate my efforts.)  So I'm still formulating my Earth Day plans.

Maybe Saint Marty will watch Wall-E and eat unsalted popcorn.  Or Pringles and Easy Cheese and Midnight in Paris.  But he'll think about acid rain as he's eating.

September 11: Nature Writing, Matt Gavin Frank, "Sagittarius at Dusk"

I got home a little while ago from an evening of Nature Writing.  I judged a nature essay contest this summer, and tonight was the culmination:  awards were given, essays were read, and hot chocolate was imbibed.  It was a lovely evening.

Driving home afterwards along Lake Superior at dusk, I thought more about 9-11.  The waves were crashing against the beach, and the trees were wild with wind.  The moon wasn't in sight, and by the time I hit the highway, it was coal dark.

I'm not going to get all deep and reflective.  I've had enough of that tonight.  I'll leave the heavy stuff to Matt Gavin Frank.

Saint Marty's going to eat some Pringles now.

Sagittarius at Dusk

by:  Matthew Gavin Frank

In the sand, the crab
turns over, shoots its white belly
to the teenage girl, jogging in yellow
shorts.  She thinks it's a dime

but is too wary of the fat-legged
fisherman with the blue-and-white lure
to pick it up, find out
it's a crab.

The fisherman just became a grandfather
at forty-one, holds in his heart
a scrap of metal the size
of a dime.  The purple he sees

is not real, the egret dies eating.
The strangest things keep us alive at dusk.
From this bench, I can see the power plant,
but not the tired people inside

murmuring their small stories
in between small sparks.

Works for me