August 27: "Goldfinches," Book Club, End of Summer

Mary Oliver loves her some . . . 

Goldfinches

by:  Mary Oliver

In the fields

we let them have--

in the fields

we don't want yet--

where thistles rise

out of the marshlands of spring and spring open--

each bud

a settlement of riches--

a coin of reddish fire--

the finches

wait for midsummer,

for the long days,

for the brass heat,

for the seeds to begin to form in the hardening thistles,

dazzling as the teeth of mice,

but black,

filling the face of every flower.

Then they drop from the sky.

A buttery gold,

they swing on the thistles, they gather

the silvery down, they carry it

in their finchy beaks

to the edges of the fields,

to the trees,

as though their minds were on fire

with the flower of one perfect idea--

and there they build their nests

and lay their pale-blue eggs,

every year,

and every year

the hatchlings wake in the swaying branches

in the silver baskets,

and love the world.

Is it necessary to say any more?

Have you heard them singing in the wind, above the final fields?

Have you ever been so happy in your life?

Spying a goldfinch in a field or at the edge of a field or in a tree is not unusual.  They are pretty ordinary birds, with their buttery gold feathers and po-ta-to-chip flight calls.  Of course, Oliver finds them miraculous, a source of peace and joy.

This evening, I went for a walk with my puppy.  The sun was well on its downward descent, and the air had a chill to it, even though it's still August.  (My furnace kicked in twice this morning.)  On my walk, I saw this tree full of light--green gilded gold.  I took a picture of it, but the picture simply doesn't capture how dazzlingly beautiful it was.  It was a goldfinch of a tree.  Ordinary but extraordinary.

It feels like the end of summer this evening.  Tomorrow, the fall semester kicks off at the university, so I spent most of this afternoon and evening pulling my syllabi together and updating my online course content.  If that sounds exotic or exciting, it isn't.  It's tedious work where I sit with my textbook on one side and calendar on the other, trying to plan out an entire semester for the two classes I'm teaching.  

I'm bushed.  All of last week was exhausting, from start to finish.  I can feel tiredness in my bones.  I did meet with my book club tonight to talk about Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead and eat dinner.  Some of my oldest and closest friends are members, so the discussion usually veers from reminiscence to literary discussion and back.  It was a lovely break from the drudgery of the rest of the day with people I love dearly.

However, I did see a tree on fire with gold tonight.  And it made me happy.  Because the tree seemed just as unwilling as me to let go of summer.

That was Saint Marty's Mary moment today.

September 8: Stanley Kunitz, "End of Summer," Summer Person

End of Summer

by:  Stanley Kunitz

An agitation of the air,

A perturbation of the light

Admonished me the unloved year

Would turn on its hinge that night.

 

I stood in the disenchanted field

Amid the stubble and the stones,

Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me

The song of my marrow-bones.

 

Blue poured into summer blue,

A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,

The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew

That part of my life was over.

 

Already the iron door of the north

Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows

Order their populations forth,

And a cruel wind blows.

___________________________

Yes, it feels like the end of summer this morning.  The high temperature of the day is only going to be 61 degrees.  I'm going to cut my grass one more time this afternoon.  Unless we get a spell of 80- and 90-degree days with a lot of rain, this will probably be the last mow of the summer season for me.  (Thank God!)

I used to be a winter person.  Then I switched to autumn for several years.  Now, I am totally a summer person.  I love the heat and light and length of the days.  Love being able to go for a 45-minute walk at 10 o'clock at night and return with light still in the sky.

I guess what I'm saying is that I accept that the leaves are changing colors and there will be frost on the morning windows soon.  I don't have to like it.

Saint Marty wants a vacation to Hawaii.  For the next nine months.

April 24: One Year Turning, End of Semester, Quick Fairy Tale

Now, Ives watched one year turning into another and had already begun to miss Robert's and Caroline's childhood, perhaps more than they did themselves...

Yes, part of Ives' story is the inevitable passage of time, and the losses that accompany the movement of the hands of the clock.

I am under the gun tonight for time.  I have a university commitment in an hour I have to attend.  A celebration for the graduating MFA students.  Poetry.  Fiction.  Non-fiction.  And food.

So, tonight, I have a quick fairy tale for you all.

Once upon a time, a clockmaker lived in a tiny village in the middle of an immense forest.  The clockmaker's name was Gus.

One morning, Gus threw all of his clocks out of the window of his cottage.  When his neighbors asked why he had done it, Gus said, "I was drunk."

(I bet you thought I was going to say Gus wanted to make time fly.  I'm a little more original than that.)

Moral of the story:  Clockmakers can't hold their liquor.

And Saint Marty lived happily ever after.

No time tonight...

August 17: Preparations, Classic Saint Marty, New Cartoon

After I'm done typing this post, I'm going to work on my syllabi for the upcoming semester at the university.  I've already completed a lot of the preliminary stuff.  Looking up important dates, classroom numbers, exam times and days.  Now, I have to plug all those things into my existing syllabi, switch a few numbers around, and Presto!  Instant semester.

It's a tedious process.  Busy work, mostly.  However, it will keep me sane for the next three months.  I can't go into the fall feeling unprepared.  It causes way too much stress in my day-to-day existence.  Tonight, I'm registering my kids for dance.  Once I have those schedules figured out, I'll be able to set my university office hours.  That's the last piece of the puzzle.

I know none of these things is very interesting to any of my disciples.  That's my life right now, though.  I'm at an in-between place in my year.  No longer summer.  Not yet autumn.  I'm not ready to let go of August, and I'm not ready to grab hold of September.  Limbo.  That's where I am.

Today's Classic Saint Marty finds me in that same limbo.  Between chlorophyll green and frost yellow.

This episode aired almost four years ago, before Saint Marty was Saint Marty.

August 21, 2010:  Saint Pius X

Two days before I start to teach for the fall semester at the university.  The weather has been swerving from grey and raining to cool and sunny to humid and hot all weekend.  It is the end of summer, even though there's still two weeks of August left.  These last days of summer always fill me with melancholy.  I know, I know.  No big surprise.  I usually spend this time planning and preparing the next three months of work for myself.  Read this book this week.  Papers to grade the next week.  Quizzes to create that day.  Reading journals to review the following weekend.  I am no longer free to do what I want.  I have obligations, 50 students depending on me.  Lesson plans.  Schedules.  Deadlines.  Less day.  More night.  Basically, everything that is the opposite of May, June, July, and August.  And don't even get me started on Christmas music and programs at church.  Yes, it starts this early.  You thought Wal-Mart was bad.

It doesn't help that I just started rereading Cormac McCarthy's The Road for class, which is one of the coldest, bleakest novels ever written.  The first time I read it, I was sitting by a pool in the middle of July during a heat wave, and I still found myself getting chilled.  If you haven't read the novel, you should.  It's one of my favorites.  It's about a father and son trying to reach the Pacific Ocean in post-apocalypse America.  They're starving and desperate.  They encounter bands of cannibals who capture and keep people like livestock, harvesting them for food.  The father and son have a handgun with one bullet for protection.  Oh, and the father is dying of some ailment that causes fits of bloody coughing.  This all takes place in a landscape of charred trees and baked earth, where sunlight is a memory and everything and everyone is covered in grey ash.  Constant snow and rain.

So, throw that uplifting piece of literature on top of my already end-of-summer melancholia, and you have the recipe for a pretty shitty day.  I know I should feel blessed in my life.  I mean, I'm an English major with advanced degrees, and I have jobs that don't require me to run a deep fryer.  Let's make it even simpler:  I have jobs that allow me to pay my bills.  In this economy, that's pretty damn good.  I'm feeling sorry for myself when some people I know don't have the money to make their next house payment.  That's pretty fucked up.

I used to look forward to fall and winter, the shortening of the days, the long reach of the night.  I waited for the maple leaves to turn yellow and orange, the evenings to ice the throat when you breathe.  I've always been a lover of the dark.  That may shock some of you.  I never opened windows or curtains in my house.  I was the neighborhood Boo Radley, with kids walking by my property and whispering stories about the crazy English professor who only comes out under the cover of darkness.

Nowadays, I look forward to those long summer days, when the sun is in the sky at 5 a.m. and sticks around until nearly 11 at night.  I like the bright heat, opening windows and airing out the dead moats of autumn and winter.  I crave those dog days when just shifting in a chair from one ass cheek to another can make you break a sweat.  The thing is, in the hot months, I don't have to do anything that makes me sweat.  School's out, and, aside from punching the clock at my second job, I have the freedom to simply...do...nothing.  That freedom comes to a close tomorrow.

I don't do well with things ending, especially things that I've enjoyed, like vacations or friendships or movies or books.  It's a selfish impulse, wanting a happiness to continue forever.  In his last will and testament, today's saint, Pius X, who was one of the first popes of the 20th century, made the following statement:  "I was born poor, I have lived in poverty, and I wish to die poor."  Maybe, because of my mood, I read those words as meaning poverty of body, mind, and spirit.  Right now, I'm clinging to the happiness of the last month or so.  It has been a time of stability and relative peace in my usually chaotic day-to-day.  I've really enjoyed that.  But usually, when things are going that well, the earth shifts, and I find myself in poverty again.

Poverty is not a bad thing.  It brings you back to the basics, makes you realize what wealth really is.  Wealth has nothing to do with the tangible--money or possessions.  It has everything to do with the intangible (peace, love, security, hope), because the tangible always ends up slipping away, like sea water through your fingers.

Cormac McCarthy writes in The Road, "All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain.  Their birth in grief and ashes.  So, he whispered to the sleeping boy.  I have you."  It's a father cleaving to his son.  A man cleaving to something pure, something sacred, something intangible.  It's the way, I imagine, God cleaves to us.

Through pain.  Through darkness.  In light like summer.  That's unchangeable.  That's wealth.

Confessions of Saint Marty

August 21: Saint Pius X

Two days before I start to teach for the fall semester at the university.  The weather has been swerving from grey and raining to cool and sunny to humid and hot all weekend.  It is the end of summer, even though there's still two weeks of August left.  These last days of summer always fill me with melancholy.  I know, I know.  No big surprise.  I usually spend this time planning and preparing the next three months of work for myself.  Read this book this week.  Papers to grade the next week.  Quizzes to create that day.  Reading journals to review the following weekend.  I am no longer free to do what I want.  I have obligations, 50 students depending on me.  Lesson plans.  Schedules.  Deadlines.  Less day.  More night.  Basically, everything that is the opposite of May, June, July, and August.  And don't even get me started on Christmas music and programs at church.  Yes, it starts this early.  You thought Wal-Mart was bad.

It doesn't help that I just started rereading Cormac McCarthy's The Road for class, which is one of the coldest, bleakest novels ever written.  The first time I read it, I was sitting by a pool in the middle of July during a heat wave, and I still found myself getting chilled.  If you haven't read the novel, you should.  It's one of my favorites.  It's about a father and son trying to reach the Pacific Ocean in post-apocalypse America.  They're starving and desperate.  They encounter bands of cannibals who capture and keep people like livestock, harvesting them for food.  The father and son have a handgun with one bullet for protection.  Oh, and the father is dying of some ailment that causes fits of bloody coughing.  This all takes place in a landscape of charred trees and baked earth, where sunlight is a memory and everything and everyone is covered in grey ash.  Constant snow and rain.

So, throw that uplifting piece of literature on top of my already end-of-summer melancholia, and you have the recipe for a pretty shitty day.  I know I should feel blessed in my life.  I mean, I'm an English major with advanced degrees, and I have jobs that don't require me to run a deep fryer.  Let's make it even simpler:  I have jobs that allow me to pay my bills.  In this economy, that's pretty damn good.  I'm feeling sorry for myself when some people I know don't have the money to make their next house payment.  That's pretty fucked up.

I used to look forward to fall and winter, the shortening of the days, the long reach of the night.  I waited for the maple leaves to turn yellow and orange, the evenings to ice the throat when you breathe.  I've always been a lover of the dark.  That may shock some of you.  I never opened windows or curtains in my house.  I was the neighborhood Boo Radley, with kids walking by my property and whispering stories about the crazy English professor who only comes out under the cover of darkness.

Nowadays, I look forward to those long summer days, when the sun is in the sky at 5 a.m. and sticks around until nearly 11 at night.  I like the bright heat, opening windows and airing out the dead moats of autumn and winter.  I crave those dog days when just shifting in a chair from one ass cheek to another can make you break a sweat.  The thing is, in the hot months, I don't have to do anything that makes me sweat.  School's out, and, aside from punching the clock at my second job, I have the freedom to simply...do...nothing.  That freedom comes to a close tomorrow.

I don't do well with things ending, especially things that I've enjoyed, like vacations or friendships or movies or books.  It's a selfish impulse, wanting a happiness to continue forever.  In his last will and testament, today's saint, Pius X, who was one of the first popes of the 20th century, made the following statement:  "I was born poor, I have lived in poverty, and I wish to die poor."  Maybe, because of my mood, I read those words as meaning poverty of body, mind, and spirit.  Right now, I'm clinging to the happiness of the last month or so.  It has been a time of stability and relative peace in my usually chaotic day-to-day.  I've really enjoyed that.  But usually, when things are going that well, the earth shifts, and I find myself in poverty again.

Poverty is not a bad thing.  It brings you back to the basics, makes you realize what wealth really is.  Wealth has nothing to do with the tangible--money or possessions.  It has everything to do with the intangible (peace, love, security, hope), because the tangible always ends up slipping away, like sea water through your fingers.

Cormac McCarthy writes in The Road, "All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain.  Their birth in grief and ashes.  So, he whispered to the sleeping boy.  I have you."  It's a father cleaving to his son.  A man cleaving to something pure, something sacred, something intangible.  It's the way, I imagine, God cleaves to us.

Through pain.  Through darkness.  In light like summer.  That's unchangeable.  That's wealth.