June 2: All the Possibility, Les Murray, "Nursing Home"

Yes, I just came back from a graduation party.  So many young people in shorts and tee-shirts, walking around, trying to act like adults.  It was sort of intoxicating, the memory of that kind of hope.  All the possibility of those last days of high school, when teachers and parents and aunts and uncles are telling you that you can do anything.  Anything at all.

On the other side of the coin, there's the elderly, at the end of their long journeys.  They have done it all.  Seen it all.  But nobody wants to listen to them any more.

Maybe, as part of graduating from high school, every senior should be required to visit a nursing home and talk to at least ten residents.  Ask them about their lives.  Ask them for advice.  Thank them for making the world a better place.

Saint Marty thinks the class could be called "Growing Up 101."

Nursing Home

by:  Les Murray

Ne tibi supersis:
don't outlive yourself,
panic, or break a hip
or spit purée at the staff
at the end of gender,
never a happy ender -

yet in the pastel light
of indoors, there is a lady
who has distilled to love
beyond the fall of memory.

She sits holding hands
with an ancient woman
who calls her brother and George
as bees summarize the garden.

June 2: Didn't Like Life, Graduation Party, Heartbreaks and Heart Attacks

There was a still life on Billy's bedside table--two pills, an ashtray with three lipstick-stained cigarettes in it, one cigarette still burning, and a glass of water.  The water was dead.  So it goes.  Air was trying to get out of that dead water.  Bubbles were clinging to the walls of the glass, too weak to climb out.

The cigarettes belonged to Billy's chain-smoking mother.  She had sought the ladies' room, which was off the ward for WACS and WAVES and SPARS and WAFS who had gone bananas.  She would be back at any moment.  

Billy covered his head with his blanket again.  He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward--always got much sicker until she went away.  It wasn't that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality.  She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired white woman with a high-school education.

She upset Billy simply by being his mother.  She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.

Billy is one lucky bastard.  He isn't shot by the German soldiers.  He doesn't die on the train ride to his first prison camp.  Doesn't die in the delousing showers.  Later, he survives the firebombing of Dresden.  People are dying all around him, and yet Billy survives.  But he doesn't like life.  At all.

I have been in Billy's shoes once or twice.  When my sister was dying in a hospital bed in my parents' living room, I didn't like life very much.  Many years ago, when my wife was in the grips of her addiction and living with another man in another town, I didn't like life very much.  When my brother recently had his second heart attack, I didn't like life very much.

Tonight, I went to a graduation party.  It was for the son of one of my best friends.  There were school pictures lining the front sidewalk of my friend's house.  Hotdogs were on the barbecue.  People were playing games on the lawn.  Dogs were running around, trying to get some table scraps.  Everyone was laughing and talking.

My friend's son was making the rounds, talking to the guests.  Thanking them for coming.  At one point, just as my wife and I were leaving, he came up to us and said, "I don't think I've had the chance to say 'hello' and thank you for coming."  And it sounded sincere.  It wasn't just a social obligation.  He seemed genuinely grateful for our presence.

That graduation party--a young person moving into adulthood, so happy and hopeful--reminded me that life really is good, despite the heartbreaks and heart attacks that come along the way.  Life is good.  Can I get an "amen" on that?

Tonight, Saint Marty is thankful for barbecued hot dogs.

June 1: Leading Workshop, Les Murray, "The Cows on Killing Day"

Okay, I don't have a lot of time tonight.  I'm leading a poetry workshop this evening, something I haven't done in about two years.  I'm a little nervous.  Actually, I'm a lot nervous.

Tonight's poem I chose because it surprises me.  Makes me think.  Makes me jealous.  Basically, it reminds me why I am a poet.

Saint Marty needs that tonight.

The Cows on Killing Day

by:  Les Murray

All me are standing on feed. The sky is shining.

All me have just been milked. Teats all tingling still
from that dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouths
that gasp loudly in in in, and never breathe out.

All me standing on feed, move the feed inside me.
One me smells of needing the bull, that heavy urgent me,
the back-climber, who leaves me humped, straining, but light
and peaceful again, with crystalline moving inside me.

Standing on wet rock, being milked, assuages the calf-sorrow in me.
Now the me who needs mounts on me, hopping, to signal the bull.

The tractor comes trotting in its grumble; the heifer human
bounces on top of it, and cud comes with the tractor,
big rolls of tight dry feed: lucerne, clovers, buttercup, grass,
that's been bitten but never swallowed, yet is cud.
She walks up over the tractor and down it comes, roll on roll
and all me following, eating it, and dropping the good pats.

The heifer human smells of needing the bull human
and is angry. All me look nervously at her
as she chases the dog me dream of horning dead: our enemy
of the light loose tongue. Me'd jam him in his squeals.

Me, facing every way, spreading out over feed.

One me is still in the yard, the place skinned of feed.
Me, old and sore-boned, little milk in that me now,
licks at the wood. The oldest bull human is coming.

Me in the peed yard. A stick goes out from the human
and cracks, like the whip. Me shivers and falls down
with the terrible, the blood of me, coming out behind an ear.
Me, that other me, down and dreaming in the bare yard.

All me come running. It's like the Hot Part of the sky
that's hard to look at, this that now happens behind wood
in the raw yard. A shining leaf, like off the bitter gum tree
is with the human. It works in the neck of me
and the terrible floods out, swamped and frothy. All me make the Roar,
some leaping stiff-kneed, trying to horn that worst horror.
The wolf-at-the-calves is the bull human. Horn the bull human!

But the dog and the heifer human drive away all me.

Looking back, the glistening leaf is still moving.
All of dry old me is crumpled, like the hills of feed,
and a slick me like a huge calf is coming out of me.

The carrion-stinking dog, who is calf of human and wolf,
is chasing and eating little blood things the humans scatter,
and all me run away, over smells, toward the sky.

June 1: Wonderful New Lies, Pure Panic, Self-Doubt

Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist, "I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living."

Rosewater doesn't seem to trust his doctors very much.  Billy and he are patients in a veterans' hospital, seeking treatment for mental health issues.  Rosewater is well-read, mostly science fiction novels.  He's obsessed with visions of the future, and yet, in the statement above, he seems fairly fatalistic.  It doesn't seem like he wants to see the future.

An hour ago, I realized that I had made a huge mistake.  I thought that I was leading a poetry workshop next Thursday.  I planned on preparing for it over the weekend.  Then, I checked my e-mail this afternoon and had an "Oh, shit!" moment.  It's happening tonight.

I had almost a full hour of pure panic.  I knew what I wanted to do, but I thought I had a lot more time to think about it.  I rushed home, changed my shirt, brushed my teeth, sprayed myself with cologne, scoured my bookshelves, and scribbled some notes in my journal.

I am calmer now.  Unlike Rosewater, I am not fatalistic.  The future (at least for the next few hours) is going to be filled with poetry and poets and writing.  That is, if anybody shows up.  It may be a workshop for two--myself and the owner of the Joy Center (an old friend of mine).  No more panic.  Just an underlying current of tension and self-doubt.

So, basically, it's a normal night for me.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for unexpected e-mails.