October 18: Over and Gone, First Snow, Maxine Kumin, "How It Is," New Cartoon

"Summer is over and gone," repeated the crickets.  "How many nights till frost?" said the crickets.  "Good-bye, summer, good-bye, good-bye!"

Yes, in the fall, when the weather turns cold, the crickets seem to cry in the dark.  It's a sad sound, an elegy for hot summer nights.  The morning air is crisp, like a drink of cold water.  The afternoons are golden; the evenings, full of the promise of winter.  In two little sentences, E B. White captures the shift from hot to cold, from hot sand to orange leaves, from August sun to harvest moon.

This morning, the first snow fell in my little corner of the Upper Peninsula.  I looked outside, and the world was a chaos of white.  The snow didn't accumulate.  In fact, it almost looked like it was melting before it even hit the ground.  It was a warning, a reminder of the long months to come.

Winter used to be my favorite season of the year.  I loved the shortened days and the long, black nights.  I loved the chimney smoke funneling into the sky and the bleary Christmas lights in the sweaty windows.  And I loved being at home, drinking hot chocolate, reading huge novels while Christmas music played.  (Christmas still is my favorite holiday, but not because of the snow and cold.)

As an adult who has to battle his way to work in snowstorms, who has to shovel all that white crap, who has to pay astronomical heating bills, I can no longer call myself a fan of winter.  My idea of a perfect winter has drastically changed.  I would like an extended autumn.  One that lasts until Christmas Eve.  Then, on December 24, a light dusting of snow can fall.  Just enough to give everything that Martha Stewart touch.  Not enough to require a snow shovel.  The day after Christmas, the snow can melt.  For the rest of winter, I would accept temperatures in the forty- to fifty-degree range.  Enough to require a heavier jacket.  Then, around the middle of March, spring arrives.  Perfect.

Of course, that's not how the world works in the Upper Peninsula.  I am a realist, not an optimist.  I know what I'm in for in the coming months.  If last winter is any indication of what's to come, it's going to suck tremendously.  However, it's one of the trade offs of living in this beautiful, hard place.  We are hardy folk who choose to dwell in this little, shark-shaped piece of land surrounded by water.

My daughter complained today about the fact that she will probably have to wear a winter jacket when trick-or-treating this year.  She knows that's part of the bargain of a Yooper Halloween.  Maxine Kumin has a great poem about the acceptance of difficult experiences.  Of course, Kumin's not speaking of frozen days or killer blizzards.  Her poem is about absence.  Loss.  Loneliness so profound it sits in the room with you like a sleeping cat.

The year 2014 has not been fun for me or my family.  Professional upheaval.  Loss of income and jobs.  The death of my brother.  I will be honest.  Come December 31, I will be happy to have 2014 in my rear view mirror.  That doesn't mean that 2015 will be any easier.  It may be worse for all I know, but I'm still hoping for something better.

That's just how it is with Saint Marty right now.  The crickets are singing.  Change is coming.

How It Is

by:  Maxine Kumin

Shall I say how it is in your clothes?

A month after your death I wear your blue jacket.   

The dog at the center of my life recognizes   

you’ve come to visit, he’s ecstatic.

In the left pocket, a hole.

In the right, a parking ticket

delivered up last August on Bay State Road.   

In my heart, a scatter like milkweed,

a flinging from the pods of the soul.

My skin presses your old outline.

It is hot and dry inside.

I think of the last day of your life,

old friend, how I would unwind it, paste   

it together in a different collage,

back from the death car idling in the garage,   

back up the stairs, your praying hands unlaced,   

reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish   

into a ceremony of sandwich,

running the home movie backward to a space   

we could be easy in, a kitchen place

with vodka and ice, our words like living meat.

Dear friend, you have excited crowds

with your example. They swell

like wine bags, straining at your seams.   

I will be years gathering up our words,   

fishing out letters, snapshots, stains,

leaning my ribs against this durable cloth

to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.

Confessions of Saint Marty

September 1: Dreary Grandeur, Poet of the Week, Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur"

Even on days like today, rainy and misty and dark, there's a certain dreary grandeur in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  The maple trees on my street are already starting to color.  Half-orange, half-green.  In this weather, the brilliance is tempered to a dull rust.  But it's still beautiful.  Autumn has always been my favorite season.

I have chosen Gerard Manley Hopkins as the Poet of the Week.  Hopkins was a Jesuit priest who renounced his youthful poetic aspirations when he entered the Society of Jesus in 1877 and "resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless by the wish of my superiors."  The result of this decision was a body of work unique in language, beautiful in image, stunning in spiritual depth.

A warning:  Hopkins' poems are not easy.  The sonnets are strange in their sprung rhythm.  The images are linguistically dense.  But, when I read his work, he transports me to places of great joy and, sometimes, arid despair.

I have chosen to start with one of Gerard Manley Hopkins' most famous poems.  It is electrically transcendent, full of awe and thankfulness.

It makes Saint Marty humble, and that's a hard thing to do.

God's Grandeur

by:  Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
     It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
     It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.  Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
     And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
     And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell:  the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
     There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
     Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
     World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

ah! bright wings