November 7: Royally Old, Holiday Decorations, Robert Hass, "Fall," Confessions of Saint Marty

They decorated the tree with sets of blue, red, yellow, and green lights that resembled medicine droppers or dragonflies, bubble undulating through their shifting liquid centers; the kid of lights whose wires often overheated and started many a fire in tenement apartments all over the city.  They put up strings of lights with angel sconces and holly-colored beads.  There were ornaments from the closet, snow-sprayed and clumped with strands of last year's tinsel clinging to them.  Several were holdovers from Ives' Brooklyn childhood, battered, flaking, and chipped, but royally old and precious (along with different pieces of a creche set) and some had come from Annie's home.  And there were the ornaments Ives and Annie bought in antique shops and street markets, and some ceramic putti that they had found in a small shop off La Via di Penitenza, near the Vatican, on a rainy afternoon in Rome, during their trip to Italy years before.

I love this description of the Ives' Christmas tree decorating party, when they invite friends and friends' families to come to their apartment to eat, drink, listen to music, string lights, and hang the royally old decorations.  It reminds me of the November Saturdays in my childhood when we dragged out the Christmas boxes and decked our halls.  Each ornament and figurine holding some memory of bygone holidays.

This weekend, I will be putting up our outside holiday decorations.  It's a lot of work, but it makes me happy.  And it's time spent with my wife and kids.  We laugh and clean, staple up lights, hang bells and balls.  By the end of the time, we're coated in a thin layer of red, green, and gold glitter.  Next weekend, the Christmas tree will go up in our living room.

This morning, snow fell for the first time.  Big, fat, wet flakes.  The world is in-between fall and winter.  It's Thanksgiving weather.  Sunny and warm one minute.  Blustery and cold the next.  Frost on the car in the a.m.  Breath fogging in front of your face in the p.m.  A time of transition, my little part of the world tipping further and further away from the sun.

I give thanks today for Christmas decorations.  For time spent with my family.  For first snow.  For glitter in my hair.  For all the good memories.

Saint Marty has been pretty lucky in his life.

Fall

by:  Robert Hass

Amateurs, we gathered mushrooms
near shaggy eucalyptus groves
which smelled of camphor and the fog-soaked earth.
Chanterelles, puffballs, chicken-of-the-woods,
we cooked in wine or butter,
beaten eggs or sour cream,
half-expecting to be
killed by a mistake.  "Intense perspiration,"
you said late at night,
quoting the terrifying field guide
while we lay tangled in our sheets and heavy limbs,
"is the first symptom of attack."

Friends called our aromatic fungi
"liebestoads" and only ate the ones
that we most certainly survived.
Death shook us more than once
those days and floating back
it felt like life.  Earth-wet, slithery,
we drifted toward the names of things.
Spore prints littered our table
like nervous stars.  Rotting caps
gave off a musky smell of loam.

Confessions of Saint Marty

November 5: Predicted Snowfall, Absolutely Nothing, Robert Hass, "Counterpane: Grandfather's Death," Off the Top of My Head

At around eleven that night, a predicted snowfall had come.  He and Annie looked out about midnight before pulling the plug on the tree and going to bed, and mutually agreed how peaceful and clean the streets of New York seemed in such weather.

It's a happy scene.  One of the few happy scenes in the entire book.  It's pre-Robert's death.  Pre-grieving Ives.  Pretty much, it's a scene straight out of a Bing Crosby television Christmas special.  A glowing tree.  Falling snow.  The world dark and calm.

I have survived another week of teaching.  I get to go home tonight and do anything that I want to do.  I could watch TV.  Read a book.  Fall asleep before the ten o'clock news.  The entire evening is wide open.

My weeks are fairly hectic, what with working at the medical office and teaching.  Every morning is early.  Every day is long and busy, shuttling between two jobs.  Every night is filled with school work and class prep.  Thursday nights, I allow myself to relax a little.  Of course, I still have a rambunctious seven-year-old son and a sulky teenage daughter to deal with, but that's where headphones and AccuRadio come in handy.

So, I am thankful for this time of doing absolutely nothing, giving my brain a night off after four days of running on overdrive.  My batteries need to be recharged.  After I am done typing this post, I think I will do some pleasure reading, letting go of all my current worries.  Bad brakes to fix.  Dance costumes and tuition to somehow pay for.  Papers to grade.

Saint Marty is just plain tired and grateful for good books, good music, good poetry, and, maybe, good alcohol (something strong that tastes like root beer).

Counterpane:  Grandfather's Death

by:  Robert Hass

On the pillow
the embroidered flowers
are fading
fading that patient spider
my grandmother

who made the best
of losses
bright quilts from rags
that are every bird
Audobon ever killed
in America.

Off the Top of My Head

November 3: Education, Mr. N., Robert Hass, "Selected Haiku by Issa," Off the Top of My Head

She sometimes gave a talk about what hard work would get someone, and the kids either responded by clapping or they shouted insults, the most common being, "Oh yeah, if education is so good for you, than what are you doing here?"  Because to some of them being there was the worst thing in the world.  And sometimes the kids laughed at her and cursed, or they stared at her blankly and she'd realized that many of them did not speak or understand English.

Annie Ives substitute teaches in New York City.  Often, she faces a classroom filled with hostile inner city kids who simply aren't interested in anything she says, if they understand what she's saying at all.  Annie has ideals, believes she can make a difference in the lives of her students. 

Recently, I have reconnected with one of my favorite middle school teachers, a kind man who taught science.  In the classroom, Mr. N. was funny and inspiring.  He made the natural sciences interesting for a kid who read poetry and idolized Charles Dickens.  To this day, archaeology, astronomy, biology, and geology appear in many of my poems and essays and stories, and I have Mr. N. to thank for that.

So, if you haven't guessed it yet, I am giving thanks for teachers who inspired me as a kid.  In a recent e-mail, I told Mr. N. how important he was in my life.  He wrote back, "In teaching, the rewards aren't always immediate and don't always make the news/TV etc., but they sure make you feel like your life commitment was worthwhile."

I can only hope that, as a teacher, I have touched the lives of my students in the way that Mr. N. touched mine. 

Thank you, Mr. N., for making Saint Marty a better person.

Selected Haiku by Issa

by:  Robert Hass

Don't worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.


New Year's Day—
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.


The snow is melting
and the village is flooded
with children.


Goes out,
comes back—
the love life of a cat.


Mosquito at my ear—
does he think
I'm deaf?


Under the evening moon
the snail
is stripped to the waist.


Even with insects—
some can sing,
some can't.


All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
killing mosquitoes.


Napped half the day;
no one
punished me!

Off the Top of My Head

November 2: Poet of the Week, Robert Hass, "Basho: A Departure," "Ives" Dip, Off the Top of My Head

I do not have much time this evening to be reflective.  In a little over an hour, I have to meet my wife and attend a performance given by my daughter's dance studio.  It's an annual event that usually takes place right after Halloween.  So, I am feeling a little rushed at the moment.

However, I did have time to choose the next Poet of the Week.  Robert Hass.  I chose him simply because I love the following poem from his collection Field Guide:

Basho:  A Departure

by:  Robert Hass

     Summer is over and
we part, like eyelids,
     like clams opening.

First, I love haiku.  Second, I love the longing and loss in these three really short lines.  It's a poem that really captures autumn in all its letting-go-ness.  October and November are letting-go months.  Summer lets go.  Leaves let go.  Light lets go.  It's a season of parting.

I am not going to get all morose on you tonight.  I did that in yesterday's post.  In fact, in the days leading up to the American holiday of Thanksgiving, I have decided to give thanks for something in every post.  This task may sound easy, but I am a perpetual pessimist.  Some people see the glass as half-full, and some see it as half-empty.  I see the glass as a petri dish of virulent bacteria.

So, setting aside my normal tendencies, today I give thanks for . . . my daughter's dance performance.  It's something to which I look forward every year.  The music is good, and I get to see my daughter doing something she loves.  Plus, for an hour or so, I don't worry about bills to pay or papers to grade.  It's a great escape.

That wasn't as painful as I thought it was going to be.

It is also time for my weekly Ives dip.  There's only one question really pressing on my mind this evening:

Will I be able to afford to get the brakes on my car fixed soon?

And the answer:

Then they were silent.  They walked up a stretch of the block, across the way from the projects, a nerve-racking experience, even with a guard in a booth, because people were always getting held up, sometimes stabbed on that street.  They had reached Broadway when Robert added:  "You know, sometimes I think about what it would be like to be dead.  All I know is that He will be waiting.  It scared me for a long time, but you know what, Pop?  It doesn't anymore."

I suppose that response could mean that I don't really have to worry.  Robert isn't afraid of death anymore because he knows that God is going to be there for him.  Maybe I should stop fretting about my brakes because God is already working on a solution.

Saint Marty just has to trust.  Have faith.  Give thanks.

Off the Top of My Head

February 22: Prose Poem, "A Story About the Body," Robert Hass

One of my favorite poetic forms in the prose poem, which is sort of a hybrid of the short story and poetry.  I took a whole class one summer in the subject.  I'm not sure I've ever written a really successful prose poem, but Robert Hass has.

Saint Marty loves this poem:

A Story About the Body

by: Robert Hass

The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week.  She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her.  He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions.  One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me.  I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts."  The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity--like music--withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry.  I don't think I could."  He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door.  It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals where on top; the rest of the bowl--she must have swept them from the corners of her studio--was full of dead bees.

Don't mess with this lady...