Storyteller of the Week

 Mike Orlock 

 

 

Mike Orlock and his wife, Liz   

Mike Orlock retired to Sturgeon Bay in 2008 from a career in teaching and coaching in suburban Chicago. He enjoys travel, reading, writing, films, and spending time with his two sons (Chris and Nick) and five granddaughters (Kapri, Kayla, Rori, Rosie, and Addie Mae). He has been married since 1975 to his high school sweetheart Liz, who is his best critic and source of information and inspiration.

 For twelve years (1989 to 2001) he wrote film reviews for the Reporter-Progress newspapers in suburban Chicago and was a contributing member of the Chicago Film Critics Association. His short fiction has appeared in TriQuarterly, the literary journal of Northwestern University, and Another Chicago Magazine. He has twice been honored with Illinois Arts Council Awards for his short stories.

He came late to writing poetry, inspired by a course he took in Learning in Retirement taught by poet David Clowers in 2009. His work has appeared online in “Your Daily Poem”, the WFOP calendars, Verse Wisconsin, the Los Angeles Times, the Peninsula Pulse, Bramble, Soundings and various other venues, including the anthologies No More Can Fit Into the Evening and Seven By 7: The Door County Poet Laureates.

He won the Wisconsin Writers Association “Jade Ring” award in 2014 and the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Muse Award in 2016. He has published five collections of poetry: You Can Get Here from There: Poems of Door County & Other Places; Poetry Apocalypse & Selected Verse; Mr. President! Poetry, Polemics & Fan Mail from Inside the Divide; Con(Verse)sations with Myself; and Toes, Toads, Tulips, & Turtles: A Miscellany of Verse.

 From 2021 to April 2023, he served as the seventh Door County Poetry Laureate, and currently writes the “Mike at the Movies” column in the Peninsula Pulse.

 

Comments by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson

Mike Orlock made my list of favorite male poets when I first started reading his poems on Your Daily Poem in 2013.

He describes his poetry as “light verse with a topical twist.” and subjects include family, his dogs, travel, Door County, politics, word play, and poetry itself.

“I like poems that are clever and accessible, profound in a funny or poignant way, and I try to write poems that are fun to read or think about,” Mike says.  

I  love his creativity, his charming sense of humor and his clever way of looking at the world. But sometimes his poems make me want to get out my Kleenex.  I am proud to publish these delightful and poignant poems.

Watermelons are from Mars and Cantaloupes are from Venus

Watermelons are boys.
What else explains it?
Look at the mess they make of gardens,
growing sleek as torpedoes or
round as basketballs
under a tangle of greenery
impossible to tame.

Nothing like cantaloupe.
They’re ladies,
voluptuous and full,
sunning themselves amidst the flowers,
accenting their decolletage
with a filigree of white lace
over the swell of their budding fruit.

Watermelons wear camouflage
and wallow in the mud,
their skin hard and shiny
from all that water they slurp.
Thump one on the head
all you hear is hollow thunk.
Sniff one, all you smell is dirt.

Cantaloupe are subtle.
They know girl games
and the value of pastels,
working a palette from pale green to golden yellow
to get what they want.
They’re full of secrets and seeds
guarded like riches deep inside.

Cut into a watermelon
they stare at you with naked contempt,
promising a fight to the end:
a buried minefield of
slick black seeds
lurking under all that blood
red flesh.

Cantaloupe know how to behave in public.
They invite the knife,
seduce the spoon.
They are there to be scooped
in modest mouthfuls,
treasured on the tongue for their sweet
orangy fullness.

 

Leaves

Do leaves dream of falling
on a stifling summer’s day?
Of finally finding freedom
when the wind whisks them away?

Have they memory of the trees
that nourished them from birth?
That offered them the sun
and the fullness of the earth?

Are those first few hours of leaving
a delirious, fun-filled treat?
Is that why they burn brilliant
and turn cartwheels in the street?

Do they sense what is forthcoming
as autumn sneaks away?
Do they welcome winter’s stillness
and a landscape cold and gray?

I think these thoughts in watching
as my youngest packs his Jeep.
The leaving is the hardest
on those whose roots are deep.


The Bed

The bed was preposterous,
the largest Verlo had to offer:
A pillow-topped king-sized mattress,
individually coiled for maximum comfort
with an extra layer of memory foam,
over a box spring more intricately wired
than the space shuttle.

That’s what they were buying, he said:
Space.
Space to move in asleep.
Space to play in awake--
even if the bed cost them
just about everything they had left
from what they’d received at the wedding.

It’s worth it, he said.
This bed will be a monolith to our marriage.
Upon this bed we will build our church
and boldly go where no two people have ever been,
he said, and other grandiloquent things
until she had to laugh at his enthusiasm,
the bed was so ridiculous.

It dwarfed the tiny bedroom in their apartment.
It ate space like a vacuum,
sucking everything else in the room
into its very Verlo vastness.
It’s our Wallace Stevens bed, he said,
although like lots of things he said
she didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

Soon the bed became the focal point
of everything they were together,
exerting a gravitational pull
that kept them in constant orbit around it,
and around each other, too,
in those heady early years of exploration
and discovery.

On its quilted surface they dreamed together,
schemed together,
read together,
ate together,
lay together,
made two moon-faced babies together,
and together planned the house they wanted to build.

The bed followed them to their new home
in a leafy suburb of curving streets and straight trees,
where lawns were spacious
and property lines tastefully defined by privet hedges
for privacy as well as design.
The sky there was a giant blue bowl
that enveloped them within its circumference.

Their new house was sided a pastel shade
that reflected the mood of each day,
inviting the warm light of the sun and the cool light of the moon
to climb its walls and peek through its windows
in search of the bed that now rested
against an interior wall large enough for it,  
a fixed point in the shifting constellation of bedroom furniture.

And they were happy there, so she believed,
until the day he moved himself,
his desires and his deceit
to another bed in another house
on another curving street.
Her world spun off its axis in the sweltering summer heat.
The trajectory of their marriage was complete.

He left her a letter on his side of the bed,
To clarify any misconceptions, he wrote.
She wasn’t to blame, but neither was he--
They were bodies in longitudinal opposition, he felt--
(whatever the hell that meant)
He’d come for his things when he found the space.
She lay on the bed and buried her face.

Because he asked her not to, she sold the house
and moved across the state where her sister lived.
The kids protested at first, as kids sometimes did,
then pitched in with the move, sorting and boxing,
and helped her haul the enormous Verlo bed
out to the curb with the rest of the junk.
It looked preposterously small in the glare of the sun.


Tiresias Untuned

My wife says I’m not in tune.
This is a common complaint that has nothing to do with my singing,
which is awful, I confess.
She claims I’m not in tune with her—
her moods, her thoughts, her needs.
She chalks this up to me being a man:
Men just aren’t in tune with women, she states
in that way women state things women consider so obvious
you have to be a man to miss them.

I tell her Tiresias was in tune.
He had to be in tune.
He was the man punished by the Greek goddess Hera
and transformed on the spot into a woman.
As a woman, Tiresias married and was a mother.
As a woman, Tiresias was beautiful and desired
and could talk to birds, just like Snow White.
Anyone who can talk to birds has to be in tune, I assert
in that way men assert things men consider so incontrovertible
you have to be a woman to disagree with them.

What happened to Tiresias? my wife asks,
dubious about the relevance of his ordeal
but intrigued nevertheless, I think.
He was changed back into a man, I say.
After seven years living as a woman, Tiresias steps on some snakes
or doesn’t step on some snakes in a garden—
the details are kind of murky, this being Greek mythology—
and is rewarded by the gods and immediately transformed
back into a man. He goes on to become one of the great Greek prophets
and experts on female sexuality, I add,
figuring this conclusively proves my point.

Yeah, I bet he does, she says, shaking her head
in that head-shaking way women use to show just how clueless men can be.
Seven years a woman, and that gives him the keys to the queendom?
Snakes and birds? Only a man would believe a story like that.

She walks away trilling something princess-y
from Disney—in tune, of course—leaving the legacy of poor Tiresias
to me, tuneless as a man can be.

The Wait

From the skylight under which
my mother sits slumped
in a cloth upholstered recliner
bolstered with several pillows and throws,
I can watch gray clouds pushed by a west wind
racing to get somewhere else.

I wish I was with them.
I’m sure my mother wishes she were, too.

She is dying,
her 94 years of living
leading here, to a moment
in her house when every ambient sound
is welcome distraction from the rasp
of her breathing, made labored
by lung disease and congestive heart failure
which has ravaged her body,
reducing her to a shadow
in search of a self
she no longer resembles.

I talk of meaningless things
that won’t require the effort of response,
just to fill the void of time
in an afternoon that has become a choreographed routine
of hourly trips to the bathroom and back.
I lift her and help her
grip the walker that supports what weight
she has left. I scuffle behind her shuffling slippers
and grasp her waist when we reach the doorway
down the hall from her bedroom,
as if we were dancing again
from celebrations long ago.
When she grabs for the edge of the sink
to steady herself, I let go
and lift the lid of the commode for her,
and her robe and gown, too,
before she slowly pivots and, gripping my wrists
with what strength remains in her bony arms,
lowers herself to be herself again,
while she can still control that much
of the world she once knew.
Soon, it seems, that will be taken from her, too.

I close the bathroom door and wait,
wait for a moment to make sure she’s settled,
then return to my chair in the living room to wait
the minutes for her to call my name, that she is ready
to reverse the ritual of returning her to her recliner
where she will sit and wait with me
for the next time her bowels move.

The afternoon is sometimes punctuated with visits
from hospice nurses and other personnel,
who will take her vitals and jot down numbers on charts
while asking questions about how things are going,
or who will sit down near her and caress her hands
and speak in comforting tones things
they hope she can hear. Sometimes she will
answer with words, sometimes a nod,
sometimes a look that doesn’t seem focused
on anything in the room. In the hour they are there
time speeds appreciably, filling the silence
and lifting the gloom of waiting, until they leave
and things return to what they were.

Soon, my brother or sister will arrive to take my place,
settle into the chair still warm with my presence,
and begin again talk that doesn’t require conversation,
just sound that fills the moments of waiting. 

 

 

“Watermelons are from Mars and Cantaloupes are from Venus” first appeared in Your Daily Poem, “The Bed"  in Poetry Apocalypse; "Tiresias Untuned" is from Toes, Toads, Tulips, & Turtles; "Leaves" from You Can Get Here from There.” "The Wait" is relatively new and unpublished.