April 18, 2025: “I Could Not Tell,” Good Friday, “The Passion of Charlie Parker”

It is Good Friday of the Easter Triduum. For Catholics, that means no meat. Fasting in between meals. When I was a kid, my parents wouldn’t even let us kids use electricity between noon and 3 p.m. (traditionally, the hours that Christ hung on the cross). We had to sit inside, do nothing but contemplate our sins and suffer. Self flagellation was not out of the question.

Nowadays, I’m usually perched on an organ bench at noon, waiting for the priest to start chanting.

Perhaps because of my Catholic upbringing, I find myself an emotional wreck most Good Fridays. Perhaps it has something to do with Jesus. Or all that fasting and sacrifice and guilt. Even if I’m not in one of my blue funks, I slip and keep slipping. By bedtime, I can’t even imagine the sun rising on Saturday.

Sharon Olds writes about guilt she has . . .

I Could Not Tell

by: Sharon Olds

I could not tell I had jumped off that bus,
that bus in motion, with my child in my arms,
because I did not know it. I believed my own story:
I had fallen, or the bus had started up
when I had one foot in the air.

I would not remember the tightening of my jaw,

the irk that I’d missed my stop, the step out

into the air, the clear child

gazing about her in the air as I plunged

to one knee on the street, scraped it, twisted it,

the bus skidding to a stop, the driver

jumping out, my daughter laughing

Do it again.

                         I have never done it

again.  I have been very careful.

I have kept an eye on that nice young mother

who lightly leapt

off the moving vehicle

onto the stopped street, her life

in her hands, her life’s life in her hands.

Do I have things that I’m sorry for?  Of course.  There isn’t a human being on this planet who doesn’t carry around a suitcase full of regrets.  If you say that you don’t have any regrets, you’re either lying or a malignant narcissist or Donald Trump.  For me, Good Friday really highlights my mistakes, and they’re a lot of them.  

The truth is that I think harboring regrets is a pretty useless pastime.  By constantly looking backward, you will never be able to move forward.  You’ll be stuck forever in the past.  As a Catholic, I can go to confession, give breath to my mistakes, and perform penance.  There’s something powerful about naming your transgressions out loud to somebody and hearing those words:  “You are forgiven.”  However, I rarely go to confession.  

Don’t worry.  I’m not going to start naming all of my regrets in this post.  I don’t have the time or energy to do that, and I’m sure you don’t either.  Instead, I just want to say that, if I’ve ever hurt you in any way, I’m sorry.  I hope that you can do the same for me.  (I sort of feel like Oprah Winfrey:  You’re forgiven!  And so are you!  And you!)

If you haven’t figured it out yet, life is pretty damn short, and it just keeps speeding up with each birthday.  There is never going to be a perfect time for atonement.  So do yourself a favor:  practice forgiveness.  Let go of all your regrets, if you can.  Embrace salvation, not crucifixion.

Saint Marty wrote a poem for tonight about regrets and lasts, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:

Today is the birthday of Bob Kaufman, founding father of the Beat Generation of poets.  In honor of Kaufman’s contribution to American letters, write a poem that relies on spontaneous invention, vibrant sonics, and the tones and structures of jazz.  To get in a bebop frame of mind read a selection of Kaufman’s poems at the Modern American Poetry website . . . If you do not have access to the Internet, write a poem that begins with the line I have folded my sorrows into the mantle of summer night, from Kaufman’s poem, “I have folded my sorrows.”

The Passion of Charlie Parker

by:  Martin Achatz

Bird, you outdid Jesus by a full year,

chased by hounds the whole time, belly

full of blood, fingers full of breath,

each day tasting like the last Marlboro 

in the pack or the last sticky sex 

in the backseat of a taxi with a girl

who says she loves the gin of your

skin, could take a bath in you, baptize

away all her disappointments—find

salvation in your hands passing over

the byways & highways of her body, 

hitchhiking all the way to that little

death, heart stop, gasp, moan, my God,

my God, why have you forsaken me,

forsaken, for-me-saken, for-my-my-

my-God!-saken me, me, me-God!-me?

November 23: "Animal Behavior," Play Games, Human Animal

It was snowing when I woke this morning--a soft drift of white dusting the ground and trees.

My puppy was born in November, so much of her early life took place in winter.  She loves cold weather and snow.  When she saw the snow falling today, she became a canine exclamation point, jumping and barking joyfully, sniffing the air and rooting in piles of leaves.

Billy Collins contemplates the wild world . . . 

Animal Behavior

by: Billy Collins

Among the animals who avoid danger

just by being still,

the heron is a favorite example,

indistinguishable from the reeds

he stands in, thin and gray, at the water's edge.

Then there is the snowy egret

who must think he can make

his white question mark of a body

just vanish from the lake

by being as motionless as can be.

And when it comes to people

there's the quiet man at the bar

who lifts his eyes only now and then

as well as the girl in the summer dress

who must pretend she is not here.

And who am I to talk,

the last flamingo to leave the party,

good at avoiding danger so far,

away from any cove or shore,

conspicuous as the drink I carry out the door.

This evening, a group of friends came to my house to have dinner and play games.  It was a lovely way to end a pretty busy day.  We ate pizza, told jokes and stories, and enjoyed being together.  It didn't matter who won or who lost, and the subject of politics never came up.

For a few hours, life seemed . . . normal.  I wasn't worrying about weird cabinet appointments or the idea of a malignant narcissist having access to the nuclear codes of the United States.  Instead, we were like the herons or snowy egrets in Collins's poem, standing at the water's edge, just grateful to be quietly alive.

In the coming months/years, I think nights like this are going to be very important.  The human animal craves friendship.  Needs to feel not alone, even introverts like myself.  (Yes, I am an introvert.  Most poets are.)  We all need to be reminded that there are good, kind people in this fractured time.  

And we need puppies and herons and egrets to remind ourselves that this world doesn't belong to us, and we don't get to fuck it up for our fellow animals.

By the way, Saint Marty didn't win a single game tonight.  Not that he was keeping score.