December 24, 2024: "Unholy Sonnet #1," Christmas Eve, Dearest Friend

I may be in the minority, but I prefer Christmas Eve to Christmas itself.  

I spent most of today getting ready.  Some of the things on my list:

• Straighten up the house.
• Take my puppy for a couple long walks.
• Make and decorate sugar cookies with my son.
• Finish wrapping all the presents.
• Practice music for a Christmas Eve church service.
• Sit crying on the couch for a half hour.
• Play keyboard for a Christmas Eve church service.
• Sing in the choir at my wife's church for Christmas Eve.

Note that everything on that list involves waiting, hoping, preparing, hunger, longing.

Billy Collins writes about death . . . 

Unholy Sonnet #1

by: Billy Collins

Death, one thing you can be proud of
is all the room you manage to take up
in this Concordance to the Poems of John Donne,
edited by Homer Carroll Combs and published in 1945.

Mighty and dreadful are you tall columns here,
(though soul and love put you in deep shade)
for you outnumber man and outscore even life itself,
and you are roughly tied with God and, strangely, eyes.

But no one likes the way you swell,
not even in these scholarly rows,
where from the complex fields of his poems
each word has returned to the alphabet with a sigh.

And lovelier than you are the ones that only once he tried:
syllable, and porcelain, but also beach, cup, snail, lamp, and pie.

The former choir director at my wife's church was a one of my dearest friends.  A second mother, in a lot of respects.  When I attend Christmas worship services at my wife's church, I think of her a lot.  I can still see her in her Christmas black (she always wore black, even in summer), standing in the choir loft, saying, "Remember, we're trying to sing a lullaby to the baby Jesus, not scare Him out of his wits."  

I saw my friend's daughter at church tonight, and we hugged each other long and hard.  I wanted to ask her if she was cooking a pigeon tomorrow (which is what her mom always called a turkey).  It was a good moment in the midst of the Christmas Eve chaos.

And now the presents are under the tree.  All the lights in the house are out, except the Christmas tree.  Everyone is in bed, asleep.  According to the NORAD Santa Tracker, the big guy's flying over Texas right now.  Like it or not, Christmas has arrived, in all its messiness.

In his poem, Collins writes about all the words that appear frequently in John Donne's poems:  death, God, pie, life, and soul, among others.

Here are the words that appear in Saint Marty's mind tonight:  cookie, peanut butter ball, Santa, family, love, and spinach.  (Don't ask him where spinach came from.)

September 27: Longing, Saeed Jones, "Kudzu"

Really tired today.  I'm longing for a quiet night, although I have to teach an evening class.

I love the word "longing."  It stretches itself across sentence, line, page.  It calls to mind the feelings I had as a teenager, when the one person you longed to be with didn't like you "that way."  I remember that girl.  She was beautiful and smart, the object of longing from many people, male and female. 

I've not seen this person since I graduated from high school, many, many years ago.  And maybe that's a good thing.  She remains frozen in that longing, forever young and beautiful, like Marilyn Monroe or James Dean or River Phoenix.

And that's the way Saint Marty prefers to remember her.  Forever.

Kudzu

by:  Saeed Jones

           I won’t be forgiven

for what I’ve made

of myself.

            Soil recoils

from my hooked kisses.

            Pines turn their backs

on me. They know

what I can do

with the wrap of my legs.

            Each summer,

when the air becomes crowded

with want, I set all my tongues

upon you.

            To quiet this body,

you must answer

my tendrilled craving.

            All I’ve ever wanted

was to kiss crevices, pry them open,

and flourish within dew-slick

hollows.

            How you mistake

my affection.

            And if I ever strangled sparrows,

it was only because I dreamed

of better songs.

September 2: Private Parts, Mysterious and Unreachable, Possibilities

Werner Gluck, the young guard, was a Dresden boy.  He had never been in the slaughterhouse before, so he wasn't sure where the kitchen was.  He was tall and weak like Billy, might have been a younger brother of his.  They were, in fact, distant cousins, something they never found out.  Gluck was armed with an incredibly heavy musket, a single-shot museum piece with an octagonal barrel and a smooth bore.  He had fixed his bayonet.  It was like a long knitting needle.  It had no blood gutters.

Gluck led the way to a building that he though might contain the kitchen, and he opened the sliding door in its side.  There wasn't a kitchen in there, though.  There was a dressing room adjacent to a communal shower, and there was a lot of steam.  In the steam were about thirty teen-age girls with no clothes on.  They were German refugees from Breslau, which had been tremendously bombed.  They had just arrived in Dresden, too.  Dresden was jammed with refugees.

There those girls were with all their private parts bare, for anybody to see.  And there in the doorway were Gluck and Derby and Pilgrim--the childish soldier and the poor old high school teacher and the clown in his toga and silver shoes--staring.  The girls screamed.  They covered themselves with their hands and turned their backs and so on, and made themselves utterly beautiful.

Werner Gluck, who had never seen a naked woman before, closed the door.  Billy had never seen one, either.  It was nothing new to Derby.

I remember being that young and inexperienced, when girls and sex were mysterious and unreachable.  I remember the talk in high school gym locker rooms, all of its crudeness and longing, guys bragging about things they had never seen or done.  When I think about those four years, that's what I recall:  the longing of that time.

Me?  I felt that longing, but I wasn't that excited about being an adult.  I liked the freedom from grownup things, like jobs and taxes and college.  Yes, I had my share of teenage angst.  Worried about popularity and dating and grades and the future.  But, there was also a lot of hope about possibility.  The possibility of seeing that girl naked.  The possibility of becoming a famous writer or actor or scientist or singer.  The possibility of having sex.  When there's possibility, there's hope.

Of course, possibility doesn't disappear when you become an adult.  They just become a little less abundant.  When you get married and have children, you HAVE to do certain things.  You have to provide for your family in some way, and most people will do anything.  Shitty jobs.  Shitty wages.  Shitty benefits.  Responsibility limits your possibilities.

I would love to quit my jobs and spend the next year or two writing a book.  But I have a wife with bipolar.  I have a daughter and son in school, taking dance classes, expecting birthday presents and Christmas presents.  I can't just quit my jobs to pursue a dream.  That doesn't mean that my dream is dead.  It's modified.  I carve writing time out of my day.  In the morning.  In the evening.  In the middle of the night. 

That's my reality.

Saint Marty is thankful today for possibilities.