September 6: "Monday," Flattened, Calumet

First things first:  I do not feel quite so flattened today.  My nose isn't running as much.  My head doesn't feel like an overinflated tire.  I don't think I have a fever anymore, and my cough is present but not quite so front page news.  It's tucked in the classifieds now.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm on the mend, just in time for a very busy weekend.

Billy Collins talks about the antithesis of Friday . . . 

Monday

by: Billy Collins

The birds are in their trees,
the toast is in the toaster,
and the poets are at their windows.

They are at their windows
in every section of the tangerine of earth–
the Chinese poets looking up at the moon,
the American poets gazing out
at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise.

The clerks are at their desks,
the miners are down in their mines,
and the poets are looking out their windows
maybe with a cigarette, a cup of tea,
and maybe a flannel shirt or bathrobe is involved.

The proofreaders are playing the ping-pong
game of proofreading,
glancing back and forth from page to page,
the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes,
and the poets are at their windows
because it is their job for which
they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.

Which window it hardly seems to matter
though many have a favorite,
for there is always something to see–
a bird grasping a thin branch,
the headlight of a taxi rounding a corner,
those two boys in wool caps angling across the street.

The fishermen bob in their boats,
the linemen climb their round poles,
the barbers wait by their mirrors and chairs,
and the poets continue to stare at the cracked birdbath
or a limb knocked down by the wind.

By now, it should go without saying
that what the oven is to the baker
and the berry-stained blouse to the dry cleaner,
so the window is to the poet.

Just think–
before the invention of the window,
the poets would have had to put on a jacket
and a winter hat to go outside
or remain indoors with only a wall to stare at.

And when I say a wall,
I do not mean a wall with striped wallpaper
and a sketch of a cow in a frame.

I mean a cold wall of fieldstones,
the wall of the medieval sonnet,
the original woman’s heart of stone,
the stone caught in the throat of her poet-lover.

Currently, I'm sitting in a hotel room in Calumet, Michigan.  I have the heat blasting, and Duke Ellington is swinging in my headphones.  I'm going to be performing in a show tomorrow night--The Read Jacket Jamboree.  My voice has been coming and going most of the day.  Right now, it's gone.

And I'm doing just what the poet in Collins' poem is doing:  I'm at my window.  The parking lot is dark, dark, dark.  There's no moon visible.  The only illumination is a streetlight creating a bright pool on the asphalt.  

I need to get to sleep.  It's going to be a busy day of writing and rehearsing and performing tomorrow.  By this time tomorrow night, I will be completely exhausted.  Or dead.  

If Saint Marty does die, please have Wendell Berry read "The Peace of Wild Things" at his funeral.  

August 4: "Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches," Anxiety and Worry, "The War in My Head"

Mary Oliver asks . . . 

Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches

by:  Mary Oliver

Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches

     of other lives--

tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey,

      hanging

from the branches of the young locust trees, in early summer,

      feel like?

Do you think this world is only an entertainment for you?

Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides

      with perfect courtesy, to let you in!

Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!

Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over

      the dark acorn of your heart!

No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint

      that something is missing from your life!

Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?

Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot

      in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself

      continually?

Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed

      with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?

Well, there is time left--

fields everywhere invite you into them.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away

      from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!

To put one's foot into the door of the grass, which is

      the mystery, which is death as well as life, and

       not be afraid!

To set one's foot in the door of death, and be overcome

       with amazement!

To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine

       god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,

nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the

       present hour,

to the song falling out of the mockingbird's pink mouth,

to the tiplets of the honeysuckle, that have opened

     in the night.

To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!

☼☼☼☼

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

While the soul, after all, is only a window,

and the opening of the window no more difficult

than the wakening from a little sleep.

☼☼☼☼

Only last week I went out among the thorns and said

      to the wild roses:

deny me not,

but suffer my devotion.

Then all afternoon, I sat among them.  Maybe

I even heard a curl or two of music, damp and rouge red,

hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.

☼☼☼☼

For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,

     caution and prudence?

Fall in!  Fall in!

☼☼☼☼

A woman standing in the weeds.

A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what's coming next

      is coming with its own heave and grace.

☼☼☼☼

Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things,

      upon the immutable.

What more could one ask?

And I would touch the faces of the daisies,

and I would bow down

to think about it.

That was then, which hasn't ended yet.

Now the sun begins to swing down.  Under the peach-light,

I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean's edge.

I climb, I backtrack.

I float.

I ramble my way home.

Amazingly, I didn't have to work today.

Yet, I still found myself distracted with anxiety and worry.  Perhaps, I'm that person Oliver addresses when she says, "No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint / that something is missing from your life!"  Put on your jacket, she instructs, and go out into the world.  Become a part of it.  Sit among the thorns and listen to the roses sing.  Become a weed sitting among the weeds.  Touch the faces of the daisies.  Put your foot in the door of death and be amazed.

This struggle is nothing new to me.  As I said last night, I've been feeling acutely overwhelmed by life in the last few days.  That's one of the reasons I took today off from the library.  To let go.  Relax a little.

Yet, the whelm followed me, and here I sit now, treading water and looking for a lighthouse to guide me back to safe harbor.

Now, Oliver's advice for these kinds of feelings is to go outside and become part of the world.  Last night, I led a poetry workshop based on the poems of Wendell Berry.  One of Berry's most famous poems, "The Peace of Wild Things," pretty much offers the same advice:  "I go and lie down where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds."

I tried today.  I really did.  I didn't find the wood drake or great heron.  Or the peace of wild things.

Saint Marty did, however, write a poem about peace.  Maybe that was the lighthouse he was looking for  today . . .

The War in My Head

by:  Martin Achatz

When I find myself at my desk

weeping for the war in my head,

I reach for my pen, my notebook,

squeeze all my wild thoughts out,

fill pages and pages until

I find armistice.  Today, it was

a piece of chocolate 

melting on my tongue, 

quieting all the bombs

of the world.

October 29: It's Just Life, Grace, "The Peace of Wild Things"

Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time, but that we are powerless to prevent it.

"It's just life," they say.

It's very easy--when life seems a little or a lot out of control--to simply walk through the day with blinders on.  I do it all the time, moving from one job to another, never taking a moment to breathe or relax or look around.  Even when I crawl into bed at night, my mind isn't focused on sleep.  It's focused on what I have to do the next day.

For the most part, there's not a whole lot of time for reflection in my daily life.  These blog posts are the closest I come.  Reflection is for people who have just one job that pays all the bills and leaves a little spending money behind.  Even with my four jobs, I don't seem to ever have spending money.  There's no such thing as "extra" cash in my household.

I'm not complaining.  I'm explaining why I always feel so driven every day.  It's how I survive my weird, hectic schedule.  Well, that and a whole lot of therapy.  In fact, I just had a session with my therapist this afternoon.  I'm not going to delve too deeply into what we discussed, but it was difficult stuff.  At the end of our time together, my therapist handed me a poem by Wendell Berry, because of a comment I made about never having a minute to rest.

This is the poem:

The Peace of Wild Things

by:  Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light.  For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

After I was done reading this poem, I was in tears.  Again, my problems are complicated, and they are not the subject of this post.  The subject of this post is grace.  Every person deserves to rest "in the grace of the world" some time during the day.  For me, this poem is a reminder that grace is always available.  God sends us still water many times during a day.  Most of us--myself included--just don't take the time to notice it.

Tonight, however, I am going to try to hold off my despair for the world.  Instead, I will find some place where the wood drake rests and great heron feeds.  In my imagination.  In the stillness of my home.  In the wild places of my heart.

Saint Marty will be free for a few, fleeting minutes tonight.

August 26: Resentments, Incredible Hulk, Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things," Adventures of Stickman

There was something else.  As the years passed, little things about life in the city that never used to bother him had him pacing the floor at night:  loud Latin music, frying-food smells, voices chatting into the early-morning hours, the social life that he had previously found so quaint and familial--the men out on the sidewalks watching television in front of the stores, or playing cards or dominoes, or just talking.  Even long after people had begun to forget, when his son's name was rarely mentioned at Christmas Mass, he still felt certain resentments toward his Spanish-speaking neighbors, his amor for the culture and language had cooled along with his heart.  It was a side of himself that he did not like.  He was still very close to Ramirez and his family, but in meeting or coming across someone new who spoke Spanish, he made a mental inventory of qualities over which he passed judgement, and he kept away.

Yes, the kind, gentle-hearted Ives harbors deep resentments because of his son's death.  Those resentments find a focus in his Hispanic neighbors.  Don't get me wrong.  Ives is no Donald Trump.  Ives doesn't want to deport every person of color living in the United States.  Because his son was killed by a Hispanic youth, Ives starts distrusting any Spanish-speaking stranger.  He stays away from them and lets his anger rule his life.

Ives stays angry for a very long time.  I get that.  It's been three days, and I'm still pissed.  It isn't getting better.  To throw gasoline on the fire, I found out today that a new person is taking over as poetry editor of the university's poetry magazine.  That's the job I took over last year.  The new editor was recently hired by the English Department as a full-time, tenure-track professor.

Now, had this happened at any other time, I would have been severely disappointed and angry.  Right now, I'm like Bill Bixby turning into the Incredible Hulk.  I want to destroy something.  Unfortunately, if I say anything to the powers that be, the only thing I will destroy is my professional career.

I'm not enjoying this stage of grief at all.  Anger--especially anger this strong--is foreign to me.  I don't know what to do with it.  Nothing that I want to do is appropriate or legal.  So, I will go to the college tomorrow, I will teach, and I will keep my friggin' mouth shut.

Saint Marty is in survival mode right now.

The Peace of Wild Things

by:  Wendell Berry

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Adventures of STICKMAN