January 23, 2026: “Practicing,” Being Gone, “Exes”

It was a good day to stay inside.  In fact, it was a good day just to stay in bed.

The windchills were between -35 ad -40 degrees Fahrenheit.  I’m pretty sure all the schools and colleges and universities in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan were shut down.  I took the day off work.  (I planned this a while ago, independent of the weather forecasts.)

So, I sat on my couch most of today, watching dumb Hallmark Christmas movies, practicing being gone.

Marie Howe on being a ghost . . . 

Practicing

by: Marie Howe

Today I’m going to practice being dead for a few hours.

No one can expect anything from me.

No emails.  No groceries.

Our little dog Jack watches me walk

from room to room, but,

for a few hours, he is the only one who can,

and he returns contentedly to his bone.

I say bone—it’s what the pet store calls

a bully stick, which is in fact a bull’s penis—

dried out and hard.

That a small dog should chew on a bull’s penis!

Well, we eat swordfish, don’t we?

And the shy octopus whose brains

are in her arms?

The sunlight enters the small kitchen

spilling across the white enamel table

and the chipped blue wooden chair

whether anyone is there to see it, or not.

Meister Elkhart says, There never was a man who forsook himself so much

that he would not still fund more in himself to forsake.

Nevertheless, it’s good to have a dog with you when you are practicing

not being there:  you don’t feel so all alone.

Especially nowadays, it’s pretty easy to feel all alone.  I’ve written about this isolation in my previous two posts.  With so much division and cruelty happening in the streets of the United States, it’s really easy to contemplate just not being here, as Howe says.

Today, I absented myself from almost everything that I normally do.  I didn’t speak with anybody.  Didn’t work at the library,  Didn’t teach.  I even managed to look at my cell phone only once or twice all day long.I guess you could say I was practicing being dead.

It’s not a bad thing contemplating your absence from this mortal coil.  It’s a way to remind yourself of your place in the grand scheme of things.  I often wonder if what I do for a living/as a person makes any difference,  Poetry doesn’t put food in the mouths of starving kids.  Teaching doesn’t assist a homeless person with finding a place to live.  Blogging doesn’t stop a war.  Yet, I’m always reminded what Clarence the angel says to George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life:  “Strange, isn’t it?  Each man’s life touches so many other lives,  When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?”

I like to think I’d leave an awful hole if I wasn’t here.  Whenever I do something, my goal is always the same:  leave the world a better place.  I want to be remembered as someone who loved and cared deeply for everyone and everything.  I’m sure I don’t always succeed.  However, I try each and every day.  That’s all any of us can do.

It’s getting late.  I’m tired.  Once I publish this post, I will more than likely go to sleep.  That’s one thing Howe doesn’t say:  being gone is exhausting.  I’m not sure if that means being dead is exhausting, too.  Hopefully, I won’t find out for a while.

Saint Marty wrote a poem for tonight about people being gone . . . 

Exes

by: Martin Achatz

How do you become an ex-anything?

Am I an ex-student because I no longer

take classes?  Am I an ex-son because

both my parents are in Holy Cross

Cemetery?  If I don’t write a poem

for a year, am I then an ex-poet?

How about the best man at my wedding?

He lives in New Zealand, flies helicopters,

finds sheep in his yard every morning.

I haven’t spoken with him in two 

years.  Does that make him an ex-

friend?  Ex-best man?  Years from now,

will my daughter find an old wedding

picture, point at him standing next

to me, say, “Who’s this guy?”  Will

I struggle to remember his name?

Bobby something or other?  Maybe Brian?

I imagine he named one of those sheep 

after me, calls to it as he sips his coffee

at sunrise:  Good boy, Donald!

July 1: Full of Blood and Smoke, Wars, Bigfoot Outlook

Merton gets drawn into war . . . 

That winter, when I was talking about the England of Langland and Chaucer and Shakespeare and Webster, the war-machine of totalitarian Germany had turned to devour that island, and morning after morning when I glanced at The New York Times in the library, between classes, I read the headlines about the cities that had been cut to pieces with bombs. Night after night the huge dark mass of London was bursting into wide areas of flame that turned its buildings into empty craters and cariated those miles and miles of slums. Around St. Paul’s the ancient City was devastated, and there was no acre of Westminster, Bloomsbury, Camden Town, Mayfair, Bayswater, Paddington that had not been deeply scarred. Coventry was razed to the ground. Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield, Newcastle were all raided, and the land was full of blood and smoke. 

The noise of that fearful chastisement, the fruit of modern civilization, penetrated to the ears and minds of very few at St. Bonaventure’s. The Friars understood something of what was going on: but they lost themselves, for the most part, in futile political arguments if they talked about it at all. But the students were more concerned with the movies and beer and the mousy little girls that ran around Olean in ankle socks, even when the snow lay deep on the ground. 

I think it was in November that we all lined up, students and secular professors, in De la Roche Hall and gave our names in to be drafted. The whole process was an extremely quiet and unmomentous one. The room was not even crowded. You didn’t even have the boredom of waiting. I gave my name and my age and all the rest, and got a small white card. It was quickly over. It did not bring the war very close. 

Yet it was enough to remind me that I was not going to enjoy this pleasant and safe and stable life forever. Indeed, perhaps now that I had just begun to taste my security, it would be taken away again, and I would be cast back into the midst of violence and uncertainty and blasphemy and the play of anger and hatred and all passion, worse than ever before. It would be the wages of my own twenty-five years: this war was what I had earned for myself and the world. I could hardly complain that I was being drawn into it.

Like Merton, we all get drawn into wars that are sometimes of our own making, sometimes not.  When I was younger, I believed that, as you aged, life would get easier.  You'd fall into a career.  Into love.  Into family.  Fall into a kind of existence where every day is, at worst, normal and quiet, and, at best, a little new and exciting.  I didn't aspire to be Ernest Hemingway or a contestant on Survivor.  I preferred guided tours versus build-your-own-adventures.

Yet, despite my best efforts, wars happened and continue to happen.  I can be a little free and loose with my opinions around friends and family.  That has caused a few minor police actions.  And a few people in my life have nuclear capabilities that have led to one or two Cuban Missile Crises and a few Hiroshimas, as well.  It is impossible, in this broken world, to avoid being wounded in combat.

Of course, my personal turmoils pale in comparison to the experiences of women and men who have gone into actual armed conflict.  I know that.  The war analogies I'm using here are my way of addressing huge issues that I have dealt with/am dealing with.  I don't want to lay myself bare.  I'm not Sylvia Plath or Robert Lowell.  I'm more Emily Dickinson:  "Tell all the truth but tell it slant--"

So, my slant truth is that I am in the trenches.  Have been for a few years now.  Only a handful of people know the whole story, because, believe it or not, I'm a fairly private individual.  In my poetry, I've let Bigfoot do the talking for me.  For four or five years, he's been my surrogate, dealing with the slings and arrows.  He's bigger and stronger than me.  Can carry the world on his broad shoulders a lot longer than I can.

More people need Bigfoot in their lives.  Or more people need to be Bigfoot.  I may sound crazy right now, but that's okay.  I'm speaking my Bigfoot truth.  You see, wars are senseless things, usually started by people who have lost sight of what it means to be a part of humanity.  It's very easy to hurt a person if all you are focused on is yourself.  Your own pleasures and wants.  That's called narcissism, and it will eventually lead to abandonment, isolation, depression, mental illness.  And war.

I prefer a Bigfoot outlook.  Where you don't use the world solely for your own selfish needs.  Where love isn't a finite resource, that shifts and changes and disappears.  Where the song of spring peepers can thaw a frozen heart.  Where everyone has a cave filled with pine bough beds and piles of sweet apples.  Where giants stand hidden in the forest verge, keeping guard against greed and hunger and sorrow.  Where footprints are deep and wide and full of mud.  Where forever is forever, with shoulders that span the universe.

Perhaps the reason Bigfoot remains myth is pretty simple:  human beings are too human.  We embrace all the things that hurt and destroy.  We declare war on each other and the world.  Until all that changes, Bigfoot is never going to come out of the woods.  Will remain a mystery.

And that's Saint Marty's slant Bigfoot truth.

A Good Hominid Is Hard to Find

by:  Martin Achatz

Flannery wasn't into beauty:

dolls and doilies and needlepoint.

Gravity pulled her to Bantams

that strutted backwards.  Carnivals

where intersexed people spouted

Gospel.  Eucharist suns that bled

across Georgia dusk.  And Bigfoot.

She loved him sacramentally, 

as if her salvation depended on it.

When she couldn't walk any more,

he carried her around Andalusia,

so she could hear stupid cows

bellow, see peafowl blossom

into resurrection.  When she sat

at her Remington, he stood outside

her bedroom window, listened 

to her machine gun fingers

as they hunted misfits moving

through pine branches like noon

grace.  She thought Bigfoot

was a holy ghost, a hairy pentecost

in her feebled life.  In the hospital,

when she died, perhaps she saw

him enter her room, scoop her up,

cradle her against his thick breast,

carry her down a highway where 

insects sawed the heavens in two.

September 12: Red Cow, WHAMMO!, Where Poetry Lives

Thomas Merton as a freshman at Cambridge . . .

Perhaps to you the atmosphere of Cambridge is neither dark nor sinister. Perhaps you were never there except in May. You never saw anything but the thin Spring sun half veiled in the mists and blossoms of the gardens along the Backs, smiling on the lavender bricks and stones of Trinity and St. John’s, or my own college, Clare. 

I am even willing to admit that some people might live there for three years, or even a lifetime, so protected that they never sense the sweet stench of corruption that is all around them—the keen, thin scent of decay that pervades everything and accuses with a terrible accusation the superficial youthfulness, the abounding undergraduate noise that fills those ancient buildings. But for me, with my blind appetites, it was impossible that I should not rush in and take a huge bite of this rotten fruit. The bitter taste is still with me after not a few years. 

My freshman year went by very fast. It was a dizzy business that began in the dark, brief afternoons of the English autumn and ended after a short series of long summer evenings on the river. All those days and nights were without romance, horrible. They could not help being everything that I did not want them to be. 

I was breaking my neck trying to get everything out of life that you think you can get out of it when you are eighteen. And I ran with a pack of hearties who wore multicolored scarves around their necks and who would have barked all night long in the echoing shadows of the Petty Cury if they had not been forced to go home to bed at a certain time. 

At first it was confusing. It took me a month or two to find my level in this cloudy semi-liquid medium in whose dregs I was ultimately destined to settle. There were my friends from Oakham. At first we clung together for protection, and used to spend much time in one another’s rooms, although Andrew’s digs were far away in the wilds beyond Addenbrooke’s hospital. To get there I cycled through a mysterious world of new buildings dedicated to chemistry, and at the end of the journey drank tea and played St. Louis Blues on the piano. Dickens was much nearer. He was around the corner from my lodgings. You traveled through two or three courts of St. John’s College and crossed the river. He was in the so-called New Building. His room directly overlooked the river and he and I and Andrew would eat breakfast there and throw bits of toast to the ducks while he told us all about Pavlov and conditioned reflexes. 

As the year went on I drifted apart from them, especially from Andrew who ended up as the leading man in the Footlights show that year. He was something of a singer. My crowd had no interest in singing and a certain amount of contempt, indeed, for the Footlights and all that it represented. I remember that I almost made friends with one or two serious and somewhat complicated young men who were reading modern languages with me and belonged to my own college, but their reticences bored me. And they, in their turn, were rather shocked by the two-handed heartiness with which I was grabbing at life. 

In the room underneath mine, in my lodgings, was a round red-faced Yorkshireman who was a pacifist. He too was full of reticences. But on Armistice Day he got into some kind of a demonstration and all the rugger players and oarsmen threw eggs at him. I knew nothing about it until I saw the pictures in the evening paper. 

I would not have been interested in making friends with him either—he was too tame and shy. But in any case the landlord took to coming into my room and calumniating the poor man while I listened patiently, knowing of no way to shut him up. Before the end of the year the landlord was much more disgusted with me than with any lodger he had ever had before or, probably, since. 

I think it was after Armistice Day, when I had finally become acquainted with some two hundred different people, that I drifted into the crowd that had been gravitating around the nether pole of Cambridge life. 

We were the ones who made all the noise when there was a “bump supper.” We lived in the Lion Inn. We fought our way in and out of the “Red Cow.”

I've been teaching rooms full of college Mertons for over 25 years.  What Merton describes here isn't unique.  In fact, I would say it's pretty typical for 18- and 19- and 20-somethings.  They don't know who they are, what they are, sometimes where they are.  They are told on a daily basis that they're adults and need to behave as such.  Yet, their prefrontal cortexes are still in that weird state of adolescent playdough, being shaped and reshaped, over and over, by their experiences.  In the morning they wake up as bowls and then--WHAMMO!--they're flattened into plates by afternoon.

Of course, that happens to adults, as well.  You wake up, get dressed, go to the office where you've worked for the last 20 years, and--WHAMMO!--your entire department is being outsourced.  Or, you wake up happily married, go to work, and when you get back home--WHAMMO!--your spouse is gone.  There are no guarantees for stability or happiness in life.  Benjamin Franklin's little nugget of wisdom still applies:  ". . . in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."  One of my many therapists with whom I've worked once told me, "Change is inevitable."  She was right.

I'm sure everyone reading this post will agree that 2020 has been a WHAMMO! year.  So much that I took for granted has vanished.  Going to a movie theater.  Walking into a classroom.  Eating out at a restaurant.  The simplest acts of living in 2019 have been transformed into occasions of possible deadly exposure in 2020.  Two words that will probably be used, over and over, in history books about this time are "isolation" and "distance."  People have been forced to become islands by the pandemic.

I have never been a fan of WHAMMO!  In fact, I would say that I've spent a good portion of my life running from WHAMMO!  I'm a creature of habit.  I've said so many times in this blog.  As a writer, this character trait helps me.  Having a writing routine makes it easier for me to slip deeper and quicker into the place where poetry lives.

Some people might accuse me of wanting a boring life.  That's not true.  I want a life where the people I cherish most are happy and healthy and safe.  I want a life where love and trust aren't distant stars, but twin suns in my orbit.  I want my daughter to realize that she astounds me constantly with her boundless compassion.  I want my son to understand that this world is a better place because he's in it.  I want my wife to know that I've given her my best self, every day, since we've been together.  No WHAMMO! can take any of those things away.

So, yes, Mr. Franklin, death and taxes are certainties.  But I also know I can count on my daughter to hug me every night before she goes to bed.  That my son can't fall asleep until I sit on the edge of his mattress and pray with him.  And that, in the dark tonight, before I close my eyes, I will look at my wife's sleeping face and remember the first time I kissed her.

For all those certain miracles, Saint Marty gives thanks.

Check out my new podcast--Confessions of Saint Marty:

Confessions of Saint Marty podcast

November 14: Inner Hermit, Judith Minty, 6 from "Fall"

I spend most of my days talking with people.  That's my job.  I register patients for surgery, answer phones, meet with students, teach classes.  My days are all about words.

In a single 24-hour period, I may have sixty or so minutes where I'm allowed to withdraw and not think about the rest of the world, if I'm lucky.  Usually, I spend a portion of that time writing these blog posts.  So, in a way, I'm still talking.  I just get to choose what I want to say more freely, without fear of alienating anyone. 

Sometimes, I dream of being Thoreau, living in the woods with my notebook and pen.  Or Judith Minty, retreating to her father's cabin on the Yellow Dog River.  The thought of that kind of isolation appeals to me at the moment.

Saint Marty is getting in touch with his inner hermit.

6 from "Fall" of Yellow Dog Journal

by:  Judith Minty

All day, I stay close to the cabin.
My ax rings the morning.  And half the afternoon
I gather kindling, spread the sticks
to dry.  I am menstruating and have heard
that bear are attracted to women when they bleed.

I haven't spoken in three days, have seen nothing
bigger than chipmunks and squirrels
at the woodpile.  It is only beyond the perimeter
that black shapes hide, breath steaming,
low growls circling their throats.
When the branch falls, I swirl to the sound, ax raised.