May 25, 2025: "Looking at Them Asleep," Nephew, "Last Advice to the High School Graduate"

It is the time of year for change.  The trees are greening, and the lawn mowers are droning.  The days a stretching out, and fewer and fewer nights involve frost.  Pretty soon, the last bells of the schoolyear will be ringing, and kids will be set free for a few months to work at McDonald's, try to score beer outside party stores, and start preparing for college.  And it's time for parents to let go.

Sharon Olds writes about her kids . . . 

Looking at Them Asleep

by: Sharon Olds

When I come home late at night and go in to kiss them,
I see my girl with her arm curled around her head,
her mouth a little puffed, like one sated, but
slightly pouted like one who hasn't had enough,
her eyes so closed you would think they have rolled the
iris around to face the back of her head,
the eyeball marble-naked under that
thick satisfied desiring lid,
she lies on her back in abandon and sealed completion,
and the son in his room, oh the son he is sideways in his bed,
one knee up as if he is climbing
sharp stairs, up into the night,
and under his thin quivering eyelids you
know his eyes are wide open and
staring and glazed, the blue in them so
anxious and crystally in all this darkness, and his
mouth is open, he is breathing hard from the climb
and panting a bit, his brow is crumpled
and pale, his fine fingers curved,
his hand open, and in the center of each hand
the dry dirty boyish palm
resting like a cookie. I look at him in his
quest, the thin muscles of his arms
passionate and tense, I look at her with her
face like the face of a snake who has swallowed a deer,
content, content--and I know if I wake her she'll
smile and turn her face toward me though
half asleep and open her eyes and I
know if I wake him he'll jerk and say Don't and sit
up and stare about him in blue
unrecognition, oh my Lord how I
know these two. When love comes to me and says
What do you know, I say This girl, this boy.

Olds knows her kids, each and every hair on their heads and nail on their fingers.  That's what parents do.  They spend 17 or 18 or 19 years teaching their children how to fly, and then they open the window and watch them wing away.

My daughter will be leaving in July for medical school.  Haven't really wrapped my mind around that fast-approaching cleaving.  This weekend, my nephew graduated from high school.  I attended his ceremony on Friday, and this evening I went to his graduation party.  

It's an exciting time for young people--on the cusp of their first real tastes of adulthood.  I could see it in my nephew's eyes.  They were full of joy and excitement and hope.  That's the way it should be.  Same with my daughter.  Both of them are gazing into the future, while we parents are mourning the little boy who loved playing Angry Birds and the little girl who fell asleep to Frosty the Snowman every afternoon.  

I wish I had enough money to fund both my daughter's and nephew's educations.  I would at the drop of a hat.  (For my international disciples, I should explain that, in the United States, students have to pay to go to college.  I know, I know.  It's messed up.)  Unfortunately, poets don't make a whole lot of money, unless a Pulitzer Prize is involved, so the best I can do is offer love, support, and words.

I have no doubt my nephew and daughter are going to change the world.  They're kind and intelligent and funny.  As Olds says, I know this girl, this boy.  And I couldn't be prouder.

Saint Marty took a day off from The Daily Poet to rite this poem for his nephew . . . 

Last Advice to the
          High School Graduate

by: Martin Achatz

for Caden, May 23, 2025

I know you’re tired of all the advice:
live in the moment, choose kindness,
measure success by the number of people
who love you, follow the path that’s
overgrown and rocky. You’re weary
of all those clichés from us oldsters
who will gladly show you our scars,
name them like willful kids or
monuments on a Civil War battlefield.

Instead, I want to tell you this morning
I found a rabbit in my backyard. His black
eyes panicked, he dragged himself
over the grass, hind legs useless
as driftwood. Perhaps he was dropped
there by a hungry owl after biting
and clawing and screaming, his spine
splintered by the fist of the ground.
I wanted to help mend his broken body, 

watch him bound away into the lilac bushes.
Sometimes, though, beautiful things cannot
be fixed, and all we can do is give thanks
that we have hearts that can be broken
by suffering and tongues to sing something
sacred and tender about this fragile world
you now hold in the palm of your hand.

August 17: Dr. Larry, Poet of the Week, Maggie Nelson, "Bluets," "Ives" Dip, Adventures of Stickman

Dr. Larry, the physician who oversees the hospice care, stopped by my parents' house this afternoon.  I worked with Dr. Larry's wife for close to ten years, so his visit wasn't just a professional call.  Dr. Larry sat with my family and answered all their questions.

My mother's biggest worry is that my sister isn't eating or drinking.  Dr. Larry explained that, when a person is very ill, the body produces a hormone that suppresses hunger and thirst.  He told my mother that it was sort of the body's way of dealing with the physical stress.  Yesterday, the hospice nurse noticed mottling on my sister's legs, which can be an indication that blood is pooling and death is imminent.  Dr. Larry examined my sister's legs and said that the discoloration was due to broken blood vessels, not pooling blood.  He isn't concerned about it.  All my father could do was sit in his chair and cry, and Dr. Larry tried to comfort him.

When I stopped by my parents' house tonight, my nephew was sitting by my sister's bed, holding her hand and talking to her.  Her eye was open, and it looked as though she was actually listening to him.  Her jaw was slack, like she didn't have the energy to hold her mouth closed.  After my nephew was done talking to her, I stepped over, took her hand, and told her that I had to give my son a bath.  We had just come from a birthday party, and my son was covered in a layer of sweat and dirt and exhaustion.  "He's a little grease ball," I told her and squeezed her palm.

In her book-length poem (or lyric essay) Bluets, Maggie Nelson, the Poet of the Week, writes about visiting a friend who has been in a serious car accident:

Some things do change, however.  A membrane can simply rip off your life, like a skin of congealed paint torn off the top of a can.  I remember that day very clearly:  I had received a phone call.  A friend had been in an accident.  Perhaps she would not live.  She had very little face, and her spine was broken in two places.  She had not yet moved; the doctor described her as "a pebble in water."  I walked around Brooklyn and noticed that the faded periwinkle of the abandoned Mobil gas station on the corner was suddenly blooming.  In the baby-shit yellow showers at my gym, where snow sometimes fluttered in through the cracked gated windows, I noticed that the yellow paint was peeling in spots, and a decent, industrial blue was trying to creep in.  At the bottom of the swimming pool, I watched the white winter light spangle the cloudy blue and I knew together they made God.  When I walked into my friend's hospital room, her eyes were a piercing, pale blue and the only part of her body that could move.  I was scared.  So was she.  The blue was beating.

I thought of this passage tonight as I stood by my sister, holding her hand, looking into her one blue eye that was open.  I'm not sure if she was really seeing me.  I'd like to believe she was.  I know my sister doesn't want to leave our family.  When she got home last week, as they were bringing her into the house, she said, "I couldn't be happier."  My friend, who used to be a hospice nurse, heard her.  My sister is surrounded by love.  In her eye, I saw profound love.  And profound sadness.  Maybe it was simply a reflection of what I was feeling.  But, like Maggie Nelson says, the blue of her eye was beating.

So, my question tonight for Ives is this:

Does my sister know that she is loved?

And the answer:

...He often awoke with a gasp in the middle of the night, his heartbeat accelerated, his breathing shallow, his heart filled with sadness, his head with memory.

I have to believe that my sister, in her very weakened state, has moments like this.  Moments when she is able to think a little clearly, hear the voices of my nephew or son or mother, and feel both sadness and love.

At least, that's Saint Marty's hope.

Adventures of STICKMAN