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

July 5: A Run, Classical Music and Poetry, Classic Saint Marty

For the first time this summer, the temperatures in my little area of the Upper Peninsula have climbed into the 80s.  When I got home from church this morning, I changed into exercise clothes and went for a run.  Not a long one.  A little over a mile, but I was sweating like a marathoner at mile 20 by the time I was done.  It felt pretty great.

Tonight, I will be a part of a classical music concert and poetry reading.  It's the kick-off of a week-long celebration of Mitchell United Methodist Church's sesquicentennial.  There's tonight's concert.  Then there's a pie social.   A parade float.  It all culminates next Sunday with two worship services presided over by the bishop. 

Tonight, however, it's all about music and poetry.  So, if you're in Negaunee, Michigan, around 7:30 p.m., swing by Mitchell United Methodist Church.  Listen to some good music.  Hear some good poetry.  Join in the celebration.

This afternoon's episode of Classic Saint Marty first aired about two years ago, but, considering the Supreme Court's recent ruling, I think it is worth repeating.

July 6, 2013:  Jane Gallagher, New Poem, "Waiting for Independence Day Fireworks 2013"

All of a sudden, on my way out to the lobby, I got old Jane Gallagher on the brain again.  I got her on, and I couldn't get her off.  I sat down in this vomity-looking chair in the lobby and thought about her and Stradlater sitting in that goddam Ed Banky's car, and though I was pretty damn sure old Stradlater hadn't given her the time--I know old Jane like a book--I still couldn't get her off my brain.  I knew her like a book.  I really did.  I mean, besides checkers, she was quite fond of all athletic sports, and after I got to know her, the whole summer long we played tennis together almost every morning and golf almost every afternoon.  I really got to know her quite intimately.  I don't mean it was anything physical or anything--it wasn't--but we saw each other all the time.  You don't always have to get too sexy to get to know a girl.

Holden has a thing for Jane, obviously.  She's his ideal girl.  Innocent but sexy.  Wounded in some way that isn't very clear.  Jane is lost in the rye field, too, and Holden wants to be there to catch her before she falls off the cliff.

Holden is an idealist.  For all his talk about being "sexy" with girls, for all the smoking and drinking he does during the course of the novel, he really is pretty innocent.  He doesn't want to grow up, and he wants to save every other kid he sees from growing up, too.  Really, what motivates Holden through the entire book is love.  Love for his brother Allie.  Love for Jane.  Love for his sister Phoebe.  It all boils down to love, for him.

I have a new poem today.  It's all about love, and is sort of inspired by the United States' Supreme Court's recent decision to strike down portions of the Defense of Marriage Act.  Love can't be legislated or controlled or dictated, by government or church or family.  It's one of human nature's unstoppable forces.

Saint Marty has great faith in love.

Waiting for Independence Day Fireworks 2013

On this July 4, 
a girl with pink hair
wrestles a pit bull
in the grass as Black Pearl
plays "Stand by Me"
on the bandstand.
The sky touches the ground
with a wide palm
of sun, day clinging
to these last suckling moments,
nursing dusk's green milk.
So much skin and tattoo around,
flesh against flesh.
I smell coconut
from a flock of teenage
girls who whisper and giggle by,
Budweiser and Marlboros
from the boys close behind them.
An old man and woman sit
in lawn chairs to my left,
eat bratwurst, watch
kids loft Frisbees into the darkening
air. When she's down
to her last bite, the old woman
reaches over, feeds it
to the old man, who accepts it,
kisses her fingertips, his lips
smeared with mustard.
Two men appear.
One carries a blanket.
Their hands almost touch
as they walk together.
They spread their blanket
on the ground, the way
my mom and dad
used to spread towels
on the beach in August,
without need for word
or direction, an easy ballet
of arm and hand, crouch,
kneel, an act they'd repeated
so many times it gleamed
like a rock in lake shallows,
polished for years by tides, waves.
Everyone pauses as the men
sit close to each other,
gray heads like twin dandelions
sprouting from a single weed.
They talk, laugh, drink beer
from brown, long-necked bottles.
Soon, we all forget to be shocked
as night overtakes us,
makes us all the same,
one crowd, indivisible,
under stars and moon,
our bodies primed
for the freedom to love
the sky any way we want.

Stop by for some free music and poetry