January 19, 2025: "Best Friends," Lost Friends, "Mary Oliver Aria"

My life has been/is abundant with good friends.  

So many people have filled my days with laughter and love and kindness.  Yes, some of these individuals have disappeared--through circumstance, time, and loss--but I still hold their memories dear, like rare stamps on old letters.  A childhood friend who died of AIDS.  A college friend who drowned in Lake Superior on a late summer night.  A poet friend who battled cancer bravely, joyfully.  

I try to honor all of them, every day.

Sharon Olds honors a lost childhood friend . . .

Best Friends

by: Sharon Olds

(for Elizabeth Ewer, 1942-51)

The day my daughter turned ten, I thought of the
lank, glittering, greenish cap of your
gold hair. The last week of
your life, when I came each day after school,
I'd study the path to your front door,
the bricks laid close as your hairs. I'd try to
read the pattern, frowning down
for a sign.
               The last day--there was not
a mark on that walk, not a stone out of place--
the nurses would not let me in.

We were nine. We had never mentioned death
or growing up. I had no more imagined
you dead
than you imagined me
a mother. But when I had a daughter
I named her for you, as if pulling you back
through a crack between the bricks.
                                                       She is ten now, Liddy.
She has outlived you, her dark hair gleaming like
the earth into which the path was pressed,
the path to you.

A polar vortex is setting up shop right now across a good portion of the United States, including my little portion of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  Over the next couple days, temperatures and wind chills are going to reach 40 degrees below zero in some places.  Schools have already begun cancelling classes, and several churches cancelled worship services this evening.

I'm not going to turn tonight's post into a maudlin reflection on loss.  As I said, my life has been abundantly blessed with friendship.  I truly don't know what I have done to deserve such a wealth of love.  Perhaps because of my Catholic upbringing, I often feel . . . undeserving.  I fuck up.  A lot.  I let people down.  A lot.  But I try my best to be a good, true, and loyal friend.

Tonight, I led a Zoom poetry workshop.  Several close poet friends showed up.  The evening's theme of "self worth."  Basically, we all wrote praise poems about ourselves.  That's a tall order for a person who doesn't even like looking at himself in the mirror.  Suffice to say, it was struggle.

So, if you are friend of mine, thank you for overlooking my many failings.  I treasure your love and support and infinite patience.  If I've upset or angered  or disappointed you in any way, please accept my apology.  It wasn't my intention to harm you in any way.  I cherish and honor your presence in my life.

Saint Marty honors one of his favorite poetic friends--Mary Oliver--with a poem based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:

Today is the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe.  From 1949 to 2009, the "Poe Toaster," an unknown person, visited the grave of Edgar Allan Poet near midnight, leaving three roses and a half-filled bottle of cognac on Poe's grave.  Make up a legend or strange story about a famous person or family member, and/or share a unique way to pay tribute to someone after he or she has died.

Mary Oliver Aria

by: Martin Achatz

My dog charged into the iceberg

of morning, her bark sharp

as a pickax, cracking nosebleed

air into shards.  Mary, you

would have been right there

with her, the tail of your body

wagging, waiting for the ball

of day to be thrown so you

could chase it across the field

into the trees, the soft animal

of you hungry to connect 

with this frozen world where

your imagination was always 

most alive.  I kneel at the edge 

of Blackwater Pond, lower

my head to the water, lap

long and hard, tasting its

rocks and leaves and fire,

as you often did.  I let its

winter rattle my ribs, fill

my blood with wild geese

crying for you over and over--

Mary  Mary  Mary  Mary--

until something green

and beautiful  begins 

to thaw inside me.

August 17: "More Than a Woman," Music, Heartbreak and Yodeling

Most of my weekends are filled with music.  On slow weekends, I play the keyboard/pipe organ at two churches.  Busy weekends--it's three, sometimes four churches.  I've been doing this since I was about 17 years old.  I can't remember a time when music wasn't a big part of my existence.

This afternoon, I spent a couple hours practicing songs for this weekend's worship services--one Catholic and one Lutheran.  A lot of people wonder why I practice music that I've played so much.  I will admit that most hymns are pretty familiar to me, be they Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, or Baptist.  The tune for "Amazing Grace" is the same no matter what denomination is singing it.  However, it's always the music I know best that unfailingly gives me problems.  So, I practice everything.

Usually, one of these weekend songs gets stuck in my head for three or four days.  I hear it all day, every day.  This weekend, it's a song titled "Lead Me, Lord."  I played it at tonight's Mass as the priest was marching up the aisle.  It's pretty rousing--almost a call to action.  It's got a good beat, and you can dance to it, as they used to say on American Bandstand.

Billy Collins deals with an ear worm in today's poem . . .

"More Than a Woman"

by: Billy Collins

Ever since I woke up today, 

a song has been playing uncontrollably 

in my head--a tape looping 

over the spools of the brain, 

a rosary in the hands of a frenetic nun, 

mad fan belt of a tune. 

It must have escaped from the radio

last night on the drive home 

and tunneled while I slept 

from my ears to the center of my cortex. 

It is a song so cloying and vapid 

I won’t even bother mentioning the title, 

but on it plays as if I were a turntable 

covered with dancing children 

and their spooky pantomimes, 

as if everything I had ever learned 

was slowly being replaced 

by its slinky chords and the puff-balls of its lyrics. 

It played while I watered the plants 

and continued when I brought in the mail 

and fanned out the letters on a table. 

It repeated itself when I took a walk 

and watched from a bridge 

brown leaves floating in the channels of a current. 

Late in the afternoon it seemed to fade, 

but I heard it again at the restaurant 

when I peered in at the lobsters 

lying on the bottom of an illuminated 

tank which was filled to the brim 

with their copious tears. 

And now at this dark window 

in the middle of the night 

I am beginning to think 

I could be listening to music of the spheres, 

the sound no one ever hears 

because it has been playing forever, 

only the spheres are colored pool balls, 

and the music is oozing from a jukebox 

whose lights I can just make out through the clouds.

I do believe that we are surrounded by music all day.  Medieval writers and thinkers referred to it as the music of the spheres.  Basically, they thought that the movement of the planets and celestial bodies created heavenly harmonies that played constantly.  However, since this noise was always present, human beings simply didn't notice it or became immune to it.

Now, we know that space is a vacuum, and, therefore, soundwaves simply can't exist in it.  However, the world is full of sounds.  I'm sitting on my couch typing this post, and there is a fan humming away in front of me.  When I finally go to bed tonight, I will lie in bed, listening to the noises my house makes in the dark--creaks and settlings and scratchings.  In the morning, there will be crows and mourning doves singing outside my window.  In colder months, my furnace will rumble to life every once in a while.

This is the music of the spheres, I think.  Everyday sounds that we just ignore.  Some people ask me where I get ideas for my poems,  (I'm sure musicians get the same question about their songs.)  Here is my answer:  I listen to what's all around me, and I write it down.  Sometimes, it's a hymn about searching for love or joy.  Other times, it's an old Hank Williams tune filled with heartbreak and yodeling.  If you pay close enough attention, you can hear it, too.

Saint Marty can hear a cold piece of pizza calling him from the fridge right now.  It sort of sounds like Dean Martin singing "That's Amore."

November 26: "Jack," Work Horse, Christmastide

Mary Oliver reflects on changing seasons in life . . .

Jack

by:  Mary Oliver

The wagons stand

And rust, and glitter sometimes in the moon,

Since we have lost dominion of the fields.

No more great clattering Jack,

His thick mane filled with chaff and wind,

Will let us lead him from the easy barns;

No more sweet gentle Jack

Will let us strap him to his leather bondage

And help us tow the weight of summer home.

The days

Are easier now, and we have time for thought,

Idling in corners of our weedy land.

But now we learn, as season follows season

And no one plants upon these hills,

How poor a gift is freedom to the spirit

That loved the labor.  Now, like Jack,

We stand turned out into eternal Sunday,

And look through moonlight at the silenced wagons.

Yet we have lives to balance our regret,

Can turn in other things.

Now in the moonlight we can move away,

While he is left staring upon the stark

Arrangement of the wagons leaning earthward:

The simple blood that cannot name its lack,

But knows the world has fallen out of reason,

That it is autumn, and no laborer comes.

Oliver says in this poem, "How poor a gift is freedom to the spirit / That loved the labor . . ."  Jack--sweet gentle Jack--is used to the rhythm of the seasons.  Plowing.  Furrowing.  Planting,  Harvesting.  Plowing again.  All Jack knows is the great clattering work of the farm, and, when he no longer has that work, Jack is lost.  He's entered a world of eternal Sunday.

As a person who works every day of his life, I sort of envy Jack.  Yes, Jack's a work horse, accustomed to hard labor, and when that back-breaking work becomes a footnote in his life, he is left staring at the remnants of his old existence forlornly.  Like Jack, I'm kind of a work horse, too.  I love most of my jobs.  Teaching at the university.  Planning programs for the library.  Playing organ/keyboard for various churches on the weekends.  Blogging.  Writing poetry.  Leading poetry workshops.

But, let's face it, work--even fulfilling work--can be exhausting.  That's why I envy Jack's eternal Sunday.  To have a life that is just sabbath, day after day, sounds pretty good to me at the moment.  You see, there are two seasons in my life that are most busy:  Christmas and Easter.  At Christmas, there's final grading at the university on top of all the usual holiday craziness, including five or six additional worship services on Christmas Eve and Day for various denominations--Catholic, Lutheran, and Methodist mostly.  Easter is much the same--forty days of extras, including Holy Week, which culminates in about five or six services in the space of three days.

So, you can see why being put out to pasture doesn't sound quite so terrible to me right now.

On the other hand, I am not a person who can remain idle very long.  I have a feeling that, if/when I'm able to retire,  I will find other ways to fill my time.  That's just the way I'm built, I think.  Like Jack.

So, if you happen to run into me in the next few weeks, please pardon me for being distracted or frazzled or bone tired.

Saint Marty is simply back in his Christmastide saddle again.