September 17, 2025: “Full Summer,” Road Trip, “Reflections on Water, or My Brother Tried to Drown Me”

Yes, it has been quite a while since I’ve posted.  

I’d like to say that I’ve been busy or sick or traveling or protesting.  Of course, I’ve been swamped with teaching and library events.  I’m just trying to settle into my fall schedule.  No colds or flus, and no roadtrips.  And every day of my life is an act of protest—because I try to be kind and understanding and compassionate to everyone.  (I know that’s a revolutionary in this country at this time.)  My excuse (whether legitimate or not):  I’ve been exhausted every night I’ve gotten home.

Summer is definitely coming to an end.  The maple trees on my property have already begin changing color.  We’ve already had a few nights when the furnace kicked in.  But no frost warnings, yet.  Schools are back in session, and the sun is setting before 8:30 p.m. these days.  Yet, I’m not ready to surrender to autumn and winter just yet.  I am a summer holdout.

Sharon Olds writes about the good ol’ summertime . . . 

Full Summer

by: Sharon Olds

I paused, and paused, over your body,

to feel the current of desire pull

and pull through me.  Our hair was still wet,

mine like a knotted wrack, it fell

across you as I paused, a soaked coil

around your glans.  When one of your hairs

dried, it lifted a bare nerve.

On the beach, above us, a cloud had appeared in

the clear air, a clockwise loop coming

in out of nothing, now the skin of your scrotum

moved like a live being, an animal,

I began to lick you, the foreskin lightly

stuck in one spot, like a petal, I love

to free it—just so—in joy,

and to sip from the little crying lips

at the tip.  Then there was no more pausing,

nor was this the taker,

some new one came

and sucked, and up from where I had been hiding I was

drawn in a heavy spiral out of matter

over into another world

I had thought I would have to die to reach.

This is prime Sharon Olds material:  sex, summer, sun.  It’s like an Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon beach blanket blowjob movie.  There’s something sexily nostalgic in her poem.  Even though she’s an adult, married woman in the poem, her words bring me back to my teenage summers.  That coming-of-age time.

 Well, it has been really warm these last five days, and today was no different.  It has been hitting the 80s since about last Saturday.  Tomorrow, my son and I care going on a road trip.  It was supposed to be my whole family going, but my wife tested positive for COVID on Monday, and then she had a little fender-bender with a UPS truck (no damage that I’m willing to claim with insurance).  Today, when my wife was taking our puppy for a walk around the block, a neighbor’s German shepherd attacked her.  The good news is that, thanks to my wife’s quick actions, the neighbor’s dog wasn’t able to do as much damage as the last time our puppy was attacked.  We did file a police report and took our dog to the vet.  The vet examined her and found a deep puncture on her right back leg.  

The itinerary for this weekend’s trip has changed drastically.  My wife and puppy are staying home.  My son and I are driving downstate.  We are staying in Mount Pleasant where my daughter is attending medical school, but we aren’t going to meet up with her because she’s got a final exam next Monday and doesn’t want to take the chance of catching COVID.

So, basically, my son and I are going to stay at an Airbnb by ourselves and try to find a way to amuse ourselves.  I actually planned an extra day in Mount Pleasant to have more time with my daughter, but fate had other plans.  It’s feels like a summer vacation gone terribly wrong—I’m Clark Griswold from the U.P. of Michigan.

A couple days ago, Saint Marty wrote a poem in a writing workshop led by a good friend of his.  (His friend called it a flash lyric essay.). Whether essay or poem, it has nothing to do with COVID or dog attacks.  Or summer, for that matter.

Reflections on Water, or My Brother Tried to Drown Me

by: Martin Achatz

I should have enjoyed the mist making my child face drip like an apple in the IGA produce section.

Fish.  I smelled fish, tasted fish in my mouth.  Waves applauded with foam hands, the thug-thug-thug of the ferry’s engine slapping the day awake.

I never liked fish sticks as a kid, begged my mom for grilled cheese when she brought a pan of Mrs. Paul’s to the dinner table.

Maybe I choked on amniotic fluid as I emerged from my mother or swallowed soapy liquid while being bathed as a baby or found a drowned mouse in a toilet bowl.

Yes, I’ve always associated water with death, so I avoid wading or floating or swimming, hold myself to the riverbank or shoreline, afraid I’ll untether and just drift away.

When rain baptizes the world, I think I hear the pine trees sob.

September 4, 2025: “This Hour,” Longest Weeks, “”Mars, or How to Save a Dying Planet”

Even though Monday was Labor Day and it’s a four-day workweek and nothing catastrophic happened (unless you count President 47 still being alive), this has been one of the longest weeks in recent memory.  The only thing that has saved me from going completely Howard Hughes (locking myself away in a room, not showering or cutting my hair and nails, and pissing in empty Coke bottles) are walks with my wife, car rides with my son (to and from school), and text messages from my daughter (she took her first midterm exam in medical school and killed it).

Sharon Olds shares a moment of love . . . 

This Hour

by: Sharon Olds

We could never really say what it is like,
this hour of drinking wine together
on a hot summer night, in the living room
with the windows open, in our underwear,

my pants with pale-gold gibbon monkeys on them

gleaming in the heat.  We talk about our son disap-

pearling between the pine boughs, 

we could not tell what was chrysalis or 

bough and what was him.  The wine 

is powerful, each mouthful holds

for a moment its amber agate shape, 

I think of the sweat I sipped from my father’s 

forehead the hour before his death.  We talk about 

those last days—that I was waiting for him to die.
You are lying on the couch, your underpants 

a luminous white, your hand resting
relaxed, along the side of your penis, 

we talk about your father’s illness, 

your nipple like a pure circle of 

something risen to the surface of your chest.

Even if we wanted to
we could not describe it,
the end of the second glass when I sometimes
weep and you start to get sleepy—I love 

to drink and cry with you, and end up
sobbing to a sleeping man, your
long body filling the couch and
draped slightly over the ends, the
untrained soft singing of your snore, it cannot be given.
Yes we know we will make love, but we’re
not getting ready to make love,
nor are we getting over making love, 

love is simply our element, 

it is the summer night, we are in it.

I really love the penultimate line in this poem:  “love is simply our element.”  Olds gets it right.  She and her partner know each other so intimately that simply being in each other’s presence is enough to assuage  her grieving heart.

There is a great deal of comfort in a long-term, loving relationship.  My wife and I will be celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary this year.  We were together for about five years before we got married.  Doing the math, that’s 35+ years of love and support.  We’ve had some hiccups, bumps, and derailments in that time, but, as Olds says, love is simply our element.

Tonight, we had grilled cheese sandwiches and soup for dinner.  As we ate, we watched a couple episode of Schitt’s Creek.  Then we took our puppy for a trot around the block.  The weather has taken a turn, so my wife wore her winter coat on our little hike.  (I refuse to put on my winter gear until after Thanksgiving, so I just wore three layers of shirts and sweatshirts and hoodies.). It is definitely not summer anymore.

I’m avoiding getting all sentimental here.  The last couple months have been pretty stressful, with our daughter moving downstate, our son starting his senior year in high school, and my wife losing her job.  I don’t think I’ve fully recovered from all the upheaval.  All of my faithful disciples know how well I deal with change of any kind, and the changes have been coming at light speed recently.

Thank goodness my life is filled with people (friends and family) I love and who love me.  I don’t think I would have survived the last 40 or so days without having shoulders to cry on and ears to vent to.  Recently, I have found myself crying at night after the rest of household has gone to bed.  Not every night, but at least once or twice a week.  

I don’t think I’m sliding into one of my blue periods.  (My faithful disciples may recall I had quite a bad time starting November, and it lasted several months.). I’ve been monitoring the frequency and duration of these current “down” times; I really don’t want to end up in the same space again, especially with the weather turning and daylight shrinking.  

Again, what saved me last November was the love of my family and friends, especially my wife and kids.  Our element.  I truly believe that love is the most powerful force for change in the universe.  It has sustained me through many a low point in my life.  If everyone had minds of love, acted out of love, responded with love, the world wouldn’t be in its current fractured state.

I’m not going to belabor this point.  Either you agree with me or you don’t.  If you believe that the world can be saved by war and division and hatred, I’m not going to change your mind.  Ditto if you think that homeless people should be rounded up and shipped off to internment camps.  And if you are adamant in your support of tax cuts for billionaires and the elimination of pediatric cancer research, well then, I don’t know if I even want you reading this blog anymore.  Might I recommend some light reading for you, like Mein Kampf.

On the other hand, if your happy place involves family and friends, and if you want to save the world before all the polar bears are drowned and we’re living in fallout shelters, then you already know that love is the only thing that will save our asses.

Yesterday, Saint Marty wrote about poem about Mars and saving the planet, based on the following prompt from September 3 of The Daily Poet:

On this date in 1976, the Viking 2 unmanned spacecraft took the first close-up pictures of the surface of Mars.  Write a poem about the frantic search to find water (and perhaps living creatures) on Mars.  As there is plenty of life already here on Earth that needs attending to, your poem may or may not take on a cynical tone.

Mars, or How to Save a Dying Planet

by: Martin Achatz

There’s so much red there, even 

the air bleeds, as if the entire

world is an open wound, a bullet

hole in the belly of the universe.

We send probes, motorized gadgets

to crawl, fly in search of canals

gone dry or some indigenous red carrot.

Why do we search for something

life-giving in a place that’s just

a red stain, a murder scene?

Instead, we should go for a walk

at midnight along the shores of

of Lake Superior, let the water

numb our ankles, ache our bones, wash

over us, until we all shine like beach glass.

August 31, 2025: “The Pediatrician Retires,” Week-Long Obsession, “Dante Shares Nachos with Me”

Yes, I know I’ve been away for almost a week.  Of course I feel guilty for this prolonged absence—I’m Catholic.  No, I haven’t been eating chocolates and ignoring the state of the world.  (Although, I have consumed quite a few snack-size Milky Ways in the past seven days.)  And, yes, I promise that I will post daily from here on out, and, most likely by tomorrow, I will break that promise.

The fall semester began last Monday, so I find myself being pulled in many directions at once—from library events to lesson plans to revisions on my new manuscript to my ongoing war with insomnia.  Now, on this Sunday night of Labor Day weekend, I dream of not working.  

Sharon Olds writes about not working . . . 

The Pediatrician Retires

by: Sharon Olds

This is the archway where I stood, next to the

panel of frosted glass, when they told me

there was a chance it could be epilepsy, and

almost before my heart sank

I felt a new-made layer of something fold

over my will and wrap it, in an instant,

as if the body takes care of the parent

who takes care of the child.  This is the door

we came through each week while the symptoms slowly

faded.  That is the fruit-scale where she had

weighed him, and his arms had flown to the sides

in an infant Moro.  And there are the chairs

where one sits with the infectious ones,

the three-year-olds calmly struggling for air, not

listless or scared, steady workers,

pulling breath through the constricted passage,

Yes, she says, it’s the bronchial pneumonia

and asthma, the same as last month, the parent’s

heart suddenly stronger, like a muscle

the weight-lifter has worked.  There is the room

where she took his blood and he watched the vial fill, he went

greener, and greener, and fainted, and she said,

Next time don’t be brave, next time

shout!  And here is the chair where I sat and she

said If the nerve is dead, he will lose only

partial use of the hand, and it’s

the left hand—he’s right-handed, isn’t he?,

the girding, the triple binding of the heart.

This is the room where I sat, worried,

and opened the magazine, and saw

the war in Asia, a very young soldier

hanged by the neck—still a boy, almost, 

not much older than the oldest children

in the waiting room.  Suddenly its walls seemed

not quite real, as if we all

were in some large place together.

This is where I learned what I know,

the body university—

at graduation, we would cry, and throw

our ceiling-at-four-a.m. hats high in the air,

but I think that until the end of our life we are here.

It’s an interesting poem about parenting a child—all the duties and worries that come with the territory.  I remember those first months as a new father—sneaking into the nursery to make sure that our infant daughter was still breathing, placing my hand on my infant son’s chest to feel his heartbeat.  As Olds says, “until the end of our life we are here.”  It doesn’t matter whether a child is one or twenty or fifty, that child will always be the tiny bundle of gas and joy from the hospital delivery room.  My daughter lives six hours away now, is studying to be a doctor, but I still worry whether she has enough to eat.  There’s no retiring from parenthood.

For the longest time in my life, I was known as “the plumber’s son.”. My dad was a well-known member of the community.  Everybody knew him.  There’s very few houses in my hometown that he didn’t fix a toilet in.  Or cable a sewer.  Or install a water heater.  Even when he decided to retire, Dad still made service calls to friend’s houses.  I think that’s why he lived such a long life—he never slowed down.  Plus, he loved what he did.

I suppose that’s the key:  loving what you do.  I love my wife.  I love my kids.  And I love writing poetry.  (I should throw “I love God” in there, too, since I’m a church organist.)  You don’t retire from love.

My love of poetry has been my week-long obsession.  The prompt from The Daily Poet on August 28 was this:

Close your eyes and imagine a poet (living or dead).  Think about everything you know about this poet.  Imagine him or her sitting down with you on a comfortable sofa.  Now, as the poet to dictate a poem to you and write down everything s/he says.

Last Monday, I started watching a three-part PBS documentary on the life of Dante Alighieri.  It followed the great poet from birth to exile to composition of The Divine Comedy to death.  Since that time, I’ve viewed that documentary (all six hours of it) about four or five times.  And I reread Inferno and portions of Purgatorio.  I’d forgotten how much I loved Dante.

You see, I studied Dante for an entire semester.  My professor was a brilliant scholar from the Medieval Institute in Kalamazoo.  To this day, when I think of the character of Virgil in The Divine Comedy, I always picture this man’s face.  He loved teaching Dante, and he made me love reading Dante.

So, all of these elements from my life sort of coalesced into the idea of a poem in which I encounter the poet Dante.  Of course, everyone knows that Dante’s muse was his long lost love, Beatrice.  I decided to write my poem in terza rima, the form invented by Dante for his epic.  Basically, terza rima consists of three-line stanzas (tercets) with a linked rhyme scheme (aba bcb cdc ded, etc.)  Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso all end with a single line and the word “stars.”  

I tried to follow Dante’s lead.  For about four or five days, I’ve been writing and rewriting my poem, using terza rima and trying to stick the landing with the word “stars.”  I think I finally nailed it, but you will have to be the judge of that.

I’ve driven myself crazy writing this poem.  It’s all I’ve thought about for days.  And I’ve loved every minute of it, which proves my point.  (Yes, I do have a point.)  Love/passion isn’t something from which you retire.  I could no more retire from writing poetry than I could retire from being a father or husband.  It’s just who I am.

So, to end August, Saint Marty presents his little Dante-esque tidbit . . . 

Dante Shares Nachos with Me

by: Martin Achatz

He craved chips with lots of cheese,

enough cheese to sate

all the bloated bellies

in that glutton circle, while I ate

a bowl of Cheerios

sprinkled with raisins.  The great

poet, sulfur-seeped, lovesick, rose,

paced to the kitchen, fetched

bottles of beer from the fridge, crows

scratching the world outside with wretched

caws, as if they knew

the syllables of the name etched

on his savaged soul, drew

each letter with their inky

beaks on the sky’s blue

chalkboard:  B-E-A-T-R-I-C-E.

I tried to distract him,

avoid yet another melancholy

feast that ended in drunken hymn

after drunken hymn about

unquenched tongues, unkissed skin,

but his heart was stubborn, devout

in its infernal pining

that no Cheeto or hotdog with kraut

could dim.  So he sat beside me, whining

about all the scars

his crush’s spurn left shining

on his heaped plate like pepper jack stars.

August 24, 2025: “High School Senior,” Dreams, “Breathing”

It has been a week of ghosts, strangely.

It started with a memorial service for the father of a good friend of mine.  A lovely, selfless man who launched me on my career as a writer.  That service happened on the tenth anniversary of my sister Sally’s passing.  On Thursday, I led an open mic at Al Quaal, a little recreation area in my home town.  The open mic was, among other things, in honor the third anniversary of the transition of one of my best friends..

If you’re keeping count, that’s three ghosts.

Sharon Olds writes about the ghost of her daughter . . . 

High School Senior

by: Sharon Olds

For seventeen years, her breath in the house
at night, puff, puff, like summer
cumulus above her bed,
and her scalp smelling of apricots
—this being who had formed within me,
squatted like a wide-eyed tree-frog in the night,
like an eohippus she had come out of history
slowly, through me, into the daylight,
I had the daily sight of her,
like food or air she was there, like a mother.
I say “college,” but I feel as if I cannot tell
the difference between her leaving for college
and our parting forever—I try to see
this apartment without her, without her pure
depth of feeling, without her creek-brown
hair, her daedal hands with their tapered
fingers, her pupils dark as the mourning cloak’s
wing, but I can’t. Seventeen years
ago, in this room, she moved inside me,
I looked at the river, I could not imagine
my life with her. I gazed across the street,
and saw, in the icy winter sun,
a column of steam rush up away from the earth.
There are creatures whose children float away
at birth, and those who throat-feed their young for
weeks and never see them again. My daughter
is free and she is in me—no, my love
of her is in me, moving in my heart,
changing chambers, like something poured
from hand to hand, to be weighed and then reweighed.

Yes, Olds is hearing the tiny, ghostly feet of her daughter pattering around her home.  In all truth, I’m in the same boat as Olds.  I have a daughter who’s in med school.  A son who’s a high school senior AND.a college freshman.  My days of hearing little feet patter around my home are long past, unless you count my puppy or the occasional mouse.

I miss my toddler daughter and son.  My friend’s father was one of my favorite profs.  I think of my sister, Sally, every day of my life.  (Sometimes, I think of her hourly, depending on what’s going on in my life.)  And my friend—three years gone—well, I hear her voice every time I sit down to write a new poem or watch a fantastic movie or read an inspiring book.  All of them have been hovering around all week long.  

I start teaching again tomorrow.  The start of a new semester.  I spent a good portion of yesterday updating my online course content.  I’ve got my textbooks packed up, laptop fully charged, and The West Wing playing on the TV. (I’ve started watching the entire series again because I need to see a President of the United States I can get behind—even if said president is fictional.)

Sometimes ghosts aren’t scary.  Sometimes they remind you to be a better person.  A better husband and father.  Better teacher and writer.  And a better friend.  Maybe that’s what being “scared straight” means.

Saint Marty wrote a poem about dreams, based on the August 20th prompt from The Daily Poet:

Write a poem about a dream that has seven syllables in each line.  If you can’t remember your dream, ask a friend, lover, spouse, or child about a dream s/he recently had and write a poem about that.  For extra credit, write this poem immediately after waking up in the morning.

Breathing

by: Martin Achatz

Listen.  Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?

          — Mary Oliver

I never remember dreams.

They slip away like one-night

stands as soon as I open

my eyes.  I can almost hear

the front door closing behind

them, cologne or perfume still

lingering on the pillows.

I want my dreams to hang out,

maybe stick around for eggs

and bacon, or to listen

to morning news, sip coffee,

talk about how amazing

last night was, exchange contact

info that I’ll never use,

because that’s the way dreams are:

they slip away without a

word, walk up the street, vanish

around the corner, leaving

a vague sense you’ve lost something,

some deep, wild, and precious breath.