September 9: "Spring," Wordlessness, Searching for Meaning

Mary Oliver reflects on the bear in all of us . . .

Spring

by:  Mary Oliver

Somewhere

     a black bear

          has just risen from sleep

               and is staring

down the mountain.

     All night

           in the brisk and shallow restlessness

               of early spring

I think of her,

     her four black fists

          flicking the gravel,

               her tongue

like a red fire

     touching the grass,

          the cold water.

               There is only one question;

how to love the world.

     I think of her

          rising

               like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against

     the silence

          of the trees.

               Whatever else

my life is

     with its poems

          and its music

               and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness

     coming 

          down the mountain,

               breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her--

     her white teeth,

          her wordlessness,

               her perfect love.

Oliver loves the world.  Her poems are psalms to waves and birds and foxes and bears.  To read a poem by her is like taking a walk in the forest, a drink from Blackwater Pond, a flight into a sky choked with blue.  Oliver's love is filled with language and music and words.

Unlike the bear, whose love is wordless and dark and full of teeth.

As a poet, I depend on words.  Words help me sort out the world and my place in it.  When I'm confused or sad or joyful or angry, I assign words to what I'm feeling, create images and lines that put order into the chaos of life.  That's the job of a poet--to search for meaning in meaninglessness, light in darkness, and darkness in light.  

That bear, with her silent claws and red fire tongue and leafy ledge body, is the epitome of artless, ravenous, dark, wild love.  A love that doesn't mediate the world with words or music.  The bear wakes in the spring, hungry to taste the green glory all around her.

Human beings spend too much energy searching for the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.  According to Douglas Adams, the answer to that question is 42.  According to Facebook, the answer is to post pictures of your dinner or children or significant other or a sunset to prove how blessed your life is.  According to Mary Oliver, the answer is the dazzling darkness of the bear coming down from the mountain in spring amazement.

Every once in a while, I experience something that fills me like a puddle in a rainstorm.  I'll feel the impulse to take out my phone to snap a photo to post on Facebook or Instagram.  Or dig out my pen and journal to write a poem.  Or go home and write a blog post about it.  Instead of just standing there, letting myself drown in the moment.

This morning, after dropping my wife off at work, I drove to Lake Superior to watch the sunrise.  It was a glorious, clear morning, and the sun climbed into the heavens like an orange turtle.  Yes, I stopped.  Yes, I took a picture.  And, yes, when I got home, I jotted some lines down in my journal.

Mostly, however, Saint Marty allowed himself to be the bear, standing on the shore of the lake, lapping up the light with his thirsty ursine eyes after a long, dark winter's nap.  

July 20: "Spring," Apollo 11, Betelgeuse

Mary Oliver on the lust of spring . . . 

Spring

by:  Mary Oliver

All day the flicker

has anticipated

the lust of the season, by

shouting.  He scouts up

tree after tree and at

a certain place begins

to cry out.  My, in his

black-freckled vest, bay body with

red trim and sudden chrome

underwings, he is

dapper.  Of course somebody

listening nearby

hears him; she answers

with a sound like hysterical

laughter, and rushes out into

the field where he is poised

on an old phone pole, his head

swinging, his wings

opening and shutting in a kind of

butterfly stroke.  She can't

resist; they touch; they flutter.

How lightly, altogether, they accept

the great task, of carrying life

forward!  In the crown of an oak

they choose a small tree-cave

which they enter with sudden quietness

and modesty.  And, for a while,

the wind that can be

a knife or a hammer, subsides.

They listen

to the thrushes.

The sky is blue, or the rain 

falls with its spills of pearl.

Around their wreath of darkness

the leaves of the world unfurl.

For over seven months, I've been exploring the universe with Mary Oliver as my guide.  She inspires me to be a better caretaker, person, and poet.  I've always had a great respect for the mysteries of nature, and Oliver fully embodies those mysteries.  She asks questions without needing answers.  Observes without having to explain.  All around her, leaves unfurl, rain falls, and birds laugh and sing.  

Human beings are inherently curious animals.  That's hardwired into us.  We like to understand how things work, from the subatomic to the celestial.  Perhaps that's the divine part of ourselves.  If you believe we are made in the image of God, then the need to create and comprehend is just a reflection of the great Poet who wrote us into existence.

Today is the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and Neil Armstrong taking that one giant leap onto the lunar surface.  Fifty-four years ago, three human beings were kicking up dust in the Sea of Tranquility, and the entire planet was watching.  I'm sure it felt like humankind had just reached up and touched the face of God.

Yet, in the grand scheme of things, we still don't understand a whole lot.  We've made great scientific and technological advances, yet we're still pretty much those apes at the beginning of 2001:  A Space Odyssey encountering the monolith for the first time.  We still kill each other over waterholes and exploit resources.  

I was an astronomy nerd when I was a kid.  I know that's hard to believe, given my current state of coolness.  I had a cheap telescope, subscribed to Astronomy magazine, and got geeked about things like eclipses and meteor showers and sunspots.  I can't tell you how many nights I spent studying the surface of the moon, imagining what it was like to walk on its powdery landscape.  

I never wanted to be an astronaut or physicist.  Didn't study laws of motion or Einstein's relativity.  I was just enthralled with the idea that, when I saw Betelgeuse shining in the heavens, that light was 430 years old.  By looking up at the stars, I was literally peering through a window into the past.  Pretty cool.

Mary Oliver probably found that pretty cool, too.  The past shining down on the present into the future.  Time travel, in a way.  When the light from Betelgeuse hits Earth tonight, that light came into being a couple months after playwright Christopher Marlowe was murdered in England and Mumtaz Mahal, Queen of India and inspiration for the Taj Mahal, was born.  

We are surrounded by miracles, each and every day.  We just don't pay that much attention to them, from Oliver's flicker to Galileo's mountains on the moon.  The universe is unfurling around us, and we're just hatchlings, really, looking up at the blue, blue sky from the bowl of our nest, hungry and desperate.

That's Saint Marty's one small step of a blog post tonight.

March 7: Restless as Birds, Spring, Poet of the Week, Jonathan Johnson, "Thirty"

The woods were as restless as birds...

Yes, that's it.  One sentence.  One beautiful sentence.  I can almost see the ashes, maples, sourwood, sassafras, locusts, catalpas, and oaks jittering in the wind and sun.  That's what Dillard is describing with those seven words.  It's a line that makes me think of warmth and mud. 

Today was all light and melt.  When I stepped outside this afternoon, I could hear water.  Dripping from buildings and trees.  Running down the streets in rivers.  I love days like today.  It made me believe in spring and summer again.  There's a time in an Upper Peninsula winter when it seems like the world will be like Narnia under the White Witch's spell.  Eternal snow and ice and cold.  And then, a thaw.  A hibernation-ending day.

That's what I want to say this evening.  That's it.  Short and simple.  Spring is on the way.  It's just around the corner. 

I'm going to pick someone familiar to me as Poet of the Week.  I want to feel comfortable, at home.  So, it's Jonathan Johnson--a friend of mine.  I went to school with him. have known him for over 25 years.  He's a great guy, a fantastic poet.

Saint Marty is ready for spring and poetry.

Thirty

by:  Jonathan Johnson

Give me a moment, sun gone to shapeless
cloud at evening and wall of trees where field
is done and the unspeakable questions begin,
birch, oak, beech, poplar, hemlock, black bark spruce,
fence of wrought iron companions and stone block
corners, stone, grass, leaves, and tear the moment
down the middle. A mower has shaved the lawn.
Thin, tip broken sabres of grass are softer
than air, by which I mean absence, and cold.
Tear the moment open, the sentence of
your life falling in two, a space wood ducks
on the pond swim into. One Moment. One.
And another. Incidentally, a Jeep
Cherokee is parked on the mini-road,
feet from headstones, owners absent since before
I got here. It’s a Grand. Gold trimmed forest.
Green of starting over, a deeper green
than the new grass growing from the cut ends
of the old. Don’t give it another thought.

I hate Mondays . . .

April 17: Some More Yellow Dog, Judith Minty, Spring

I have a few more poems from the Yellow Dog tonight.

Last night, I found out that nobody signed up for a poetry workshop that I was going to conduct next Tuesday at the local library.  It's canceled.  It was a little depressing when I got the e-mail.  Of course, poetry is always a hard sell, even if it's National Poetry Month.

I have sort of recovered.  Still feeling a little ego-bruised, but I plan to drink a little bit tonight.

Saint Marty is glad it's Friday.

from Yellow Dog Journal, "Spring" section

5

Mice in the woodbox.  The fire
still warm, they must think
I am like Gulliver, either dead
or asleep.
They poke their little heads out,
they rattle over newspapers
to eye intruder
who writes in their giant bed.
Later, in the dark, they will
tie me here
with fine threads from their nests.

13

Though nearly midnight,
the sky is dawn's, shadows
of trees balanced against gray.
When I step onto the chill porch
to look for her, the moon
is there,  Nearly full
she forms a cross through the screen:  north, south,
east and west, reaching out
to mark us all in lunacy,
to set us mixing days and night.

Anybody want to get naked and dance under the moon?  Yeah, me neither.

April 12: This Lovely World, Mud, Ted Kooser, "Flying at Night," New Cartoon

“Winter will pass, the days will lengthen, the ice will melt in the pasture pond. The song sparrow will return and sing, the frogs will awake, the warm wind will blow again. All these sights and sounds and smells will be yours to enjoy, Wilbur—this lovely world, these precious days…”

Charlotte has saved Wilbur's life.  She knows he will live to enjoy many autumns, winters, springs, and summers.  The last chapters of Charlotte's Web describe Wilbur's first winter and the arrival of spring, with its sparrows and frogs and warm winds.  The lovely world and precious days.

Spring has arrived in the Upper Peninsula, I think.  Yesterday, the temperatures hit almost 50 degrees.  Today was another story.  In the morning, fat snowflakes fell.  In the afternoon, it was icy rain.  Tonight, fog.  Thick fog.  I just heard a bird calling outside.  A high chee-chee-chee-chee-cheeeee.  It's going to be cold tomorrow and the next few days, but there are streams in the street, grass in the front yard, and mud.  Lots of mud.  Winter is slowly leaving.

In the last few weeks, I have fallen into the habit of watching travel shows on PBS.  I've seen tours of Florence, Rome, and Oslo.  Watched someone climb the Matterhorn.  Sailed in the East Indies with another person.  It's strange.  I've never been that interested in traveling to foreign countries before.  But the museums, art, scenery--all of it--has really taken root in me for some reason.  Maybe it's because I know I will never get the chance to see these places in person.

That's probably why I've chosen the following poem by Ted Kooser to share with you this evening:

Flying at Night

Above us, stars.  Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water.  Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

There's a full moon shining down on my house tonight, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan of the United States of America on the continent of North America in the Western Hemisphere of the planet Earth in the Solar System of the Milky Way Galaxy of the Mind of God.

Yes, Saint Marty just plagiarized Thornton Wilder's Our Town.

Confessions of Saint Marty

April 5: Gratitude Thirty-Two, Ditches Bubbled, Joseph Stroud, New Cartoon

The snows melted and ran away.  The streams and ditches bubbled and chattered with rushing water.  A sparrow with a streaky breast arrived and sang.  The light strengthened, the mornings came sooner.  Almost every morning there was another new lamb in the sheepfold.  The goose was sitting on nine eggs.  The sky seemed wider and a warm wind blew.  The last remaining strands of Charlotte's old web floated away and vanished.

Yes, after the last two days of snow and more snow and, on top of that, additional snow, I am thinking about bubbling ditches and streams.  Rushing water.  Today, the temperatures topped out in the low 40s.  The sun was blinding as it bounced off the banks and drifts from Friday's storm.  And there was plenty of melting.  The contrast was stunning.  I shoveled my driveway and yard four times yesterday.  Tonight, I can see bare pavement and patches of brown grass.

I'm grateful for that.  It gives me hope that, eventually, spring will arrive.  Of course, it's only the first weekend in April.  For the Upper Peninsula, that means that we probably still have a couple good blizzards to endure.  But it's supposed to be 50 degrees tomorrow.  Mud weather.  Crocus weather.  The lilacs of June won't be far behind.

Tonight, however, there are six-foot snowbanks on my lawn.  They're beautiful in the moonlight.  Silvery and glacial.  Joseph Stroud wrote a gorgeous poem about snow.  Garrison Keillor reprinted it in his anthology Good Poems:  American Places:

Manna

Everywhere, everywhere, snow sifting down,
a world becoming white, no more sounds,
no longer possible to find the heart of the day,
the sun is gone, the sky is nowhere, and of all
I wanted in life--so be it--whatever it is
that brought me here, chance, fortune, whatever
blessing each flake of snow is the hint of, I am
grateful, I bear witness, I hold out my arms,
palms up, I know it is impossible to hold
for long what we love of the world, but look
at me, is it foolish, shameful, arrogant to say this,
see how the snow drifts down, look how happy
I am.

Saint Marty is happy tonight, for the snow, the melt, the rushing water.

Confessions of Saint Marty 

September 25: Only Once a Year, Making Rather Merry, Full Circle

The clerk observed that it [Christmas] was only once a year.

Of course, the sentence above is part of one of the most famous passages from A Christmas Carol.  Scrooge's response to Bob Cratchit's statement is repeated in stage and movie adaptations all the time.  I bet anybody reading this post could quote it verbatim:  "A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty-fifth of December!" 

Most people do not know that Bob repeats the exact observation at the end of the novel. He is late for work the day after Christmas, and Scrooge, playing a joke on his clerk, demands, ""What do you mean by coming here at this time of day?"  Bob, stammering, says, "It's only once a year, Sir...It shall not be repeated.  I was making rather merry yesterday, Sir."

The story has come full circle.  The difference, this time, is that Scrooge is a changed man.  Christmas is no longer a nuisance to him; it is a cause for rejoicing.  He no longer fears life; he rejoices in it.

Life has a way of repeating itself.  I think it has something to do with the fact that human beings are pretty flawed creatures.  We have bad habits, and we repeat the same mistakes.  Over and over and over.  That's the nature of being human.  It takes Scrooge almost an entire lifetime (and a few pretty scary ghosts) to change his ways.

I know my life goes in cycles.  Autumn (settling into teaching, trying to catch up with money problems).  Winter (preparing for the holidays, teaching again, feeling a little more caught-up with money issues).  Spring (ending of school, getting ready for Lent and Easter and summer, starting to worry about money again).  Summer (swimming, running, holding my breath over dwindling money).  Those are the seasons of my life, every year.

Like me, like Scrooge, I think most people live in fear of something.  I wish I could be more calm and secure in my life.  I wish I could be more like Bob Cratchit, whose life is shitty, but who seems content and at peace with his circumstances.  It's a matter of faith.  Bob has a lot of faith.  He believes Tiny Tim will get better.  He believes Scrooge is the founder of the Cratchit Christmas feast.  He believes in the goodness of people, even when he can barely feed his wife and children.  I wish I could have that kind of spirit.  The cycles of Bob's life are not ruled by doubt and worry.  They're ruled by hope and joy.  That's what I want.  More hope and joy.

Maybe Saint Marty needs to move to London and find a job as a clerk in a business office.  God Bless Us.  Everyone!

The real Circle of Life

March 15: Spring Is in the Air, Psalm 7, and Dog Crap

Well, this blog has to be quick and short.  I haven't had a lot of time to be thoughtful, aside from the few minutes I took to compose the following poem.  However, it is March in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and the temperature is in the mid-forties.  I could have walked across campus to teach my class without a coat on.  That's right.  Spring has arrived, at least for the next few days.  It bolsters my spirit and fills me with thoughts of summer.

Anyway, this poem was inspired by the weather of the last few days.  Saint Marty hopes you enjoy it.

Psalm 7:  Praise Hymn for Dog Crap

Praise the smell of dog crap in March,
Fecund as tulip bulbs waiting to sprout,
Patches of mud, pools of snow melt,
The ancient shift toward vernal equinox,
Primal as Louis Leakey's Kenyan digs,
Skulls, bones of Adam's sons and daughters,
Driven out of a place of eternal produce,
Carrot and cuke and scallion and broccoli,
Blueberry, watermelon, banana, kiwi,
But not apple, not that serpent fruit
That sentenced the human race to evolution,
To the hunch of spine to fire, to a spit
Of brontosaur, blackened with smoke and fat,
Chewed with ape teeth to a pulp of protein,
Digested, absorbed, converted to muscle,
Skeleton, tendon, blood, a form suited
To ice age and mammoth hunt, stone
Spear versus saber tooth, the struggle
With bronze, iron, pyramid, pharaoh,
The split of Red Sea, a forty-year Bataan
March in the wilderness, then a land
Of milk and honey, a land of promise,
Filled with the reach of crocus
Through frost, through mud, through snow,
Through dog crap, toward the blessed sun.

Dog Crap Is in the Air