HE LOOKS AT SHREDS OF HIS ANCESTRAL PAST


DREAMING ICE HOUSE SANCTUARY

Scouting snow solstice
Sun-tipped wild
Tucked into paradise

Jim Bodeen
20 December 2013


















ON RECEIVING THIS DAY: SABBATH POEMS
BY WENDELL BERRY, FROM A FRIEND

       —for Lee Bassett

Sunday Morning. Karen leaves early
to ring bells for early service. Sister Sadie Sadie,
The old dog, arthritic, sleeps by the fire at my feet.
The old poet calls himself Lowdown,
In his opening prayer, This Day,

Being about time always coming up short
In time's own world. I begin here, before
Reading the last poem in the book,
Mad Farmer returning to close out the present,
Recalling an early image of Christ in a barn.

From here, he steps out,
And I turn again to his first Sabbath poems
From the mid-70s. The poet sits
Through fears and songs of critters
Among trees, until he hears

His own song. Here is where we met,
And when, my dear friend, decades past,
Setting out for silence, and failing.
The poet Wendell Berry
Gives up two words: Spirit and wild,

Carrying comfort and convention.
We're the ones out of control.
It is the Second Sunday in Advent.
The first reading from Isaiah:
Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist.

Jim Bodeen
December 10, 2013


HE TRANSLATED POEMS FROM EVERY SHRED
OF HIS ANCESTRAL PAST ON HIS WAY TO HAFEZ

When the movie and love-making are over
the night remains clear, and sky opens
for poems of Robert Bly. One has only
to find one word and childhood returns.
Cistern appears and I am six, descending

basement stairs of the Victorian House
owned by Great Northern Railway,
grasslands from Saskatchewan protecting
our family from wind. I’m sitting
on the second step in winter, basement

below me, wood steps winding the way
around a mysterious cache of water.
Sitting between worlds. Get to Hafez
in Shiraz by going through North Dakota.
By pass Minneapolis. Take the door

from the kitchen to the basement. Bly
unlocks his revolutionary past through Denmark.
He says the roof of the house will last the night,
and all poems end in gratitude. The hidden center
unexpressed by the poet himself holds the key.

Remove the links tying poems to occasion.
I could not have done this work on my own.
One can be reborn by reading the Gospel
in a second language. Counting the heavens
in Robert Bly’s poems leaves a man dizzy.

Jim Bodeen
8 November-18 December 2013

Thanking Robert Bly on Thanksgiving


A NOTE TO MY SON ON THE MOUNTAIN WRITTEN
ON THE INSIDE OF A BOOK COVER AT CHRISTMAS

These books come your way
used, from places around the country.
I had them once and gave them away.
Giving them to you now, reminded
of their beauty, there’s nothing specific
I have in mind, no how to nuggets,
though there’s weather and mountains
in titles, that’s not it; neither
do I give a damn if you keep a journal
or write. Still there’s risk involved,
William Stafford only appears safe.
Whether you read them or not,
these books are the most dangerous
gifts pulled from a father’s backpack.

Love, Dad
December, 2013


CONVERSATION ABOUT THE SHOEMAKER
OUTSIDE THE TEMPLE DOORS OF THE EMPIRE

What else could he do with all that money
but buy football uniforms and helmets?

He could buy toilets
for the people who make the shoes.

Jim Bodeen
4 December 2013


LINES TO ROBERT BLY ON DAYS
LEADING UP TO ANOTHER BIRTHDAY

By midnight// The stars had already become huge talkers.
            Robert Bly “Looking at the Stars”

The two volume biography
of Wallace Stevens sits at my feet Robert Bly,
along with the Modern Library edition of his poems and prose;
twenty-some years ago, it was Iron John

bringing me to senses in ways
confounding modern medicine. It’s thanks,
giving, and abundance I send to you
this evening, stolen sugar from the empire

in green tea. You remain one of the shepherds,
angry at our lazy church, and turning
towards 70, I remain a boy from North Dakota,
writing from a shack on wheels, tucked

among trees on a winter beach
off the Oregon coast, your translations
with their winged energy delighting me
as rain tap tap taps on the flat roof

of the mothership. Rain now in its third day.
My wife and I warm ourselves under covers
reading to each other, looking at pictures.
Sometimes your comments between poets

make me one with the rain, weeping.
We have covered much of the same territory,
but as I’ve said, I’m from North Dakota.
Dry land farming and all. The Lutherans

didn’t have the same ambition in our town.
Perhaps God became clear to us only in severity,
competing as he had to with those closer stars.
We talk slower, and our humor’s dry as winter wheat,

part of our response to being laughed at
on all sides of all borders. And Minnesota,
with those lakes stealing an image from the Chinese.
When Minnesotans entered the room,

we were taught to keep our heads down.
You were exotic, on television, distance exaggerated.
Your birth poem catches me off guard,
December 23, 1926. I hope you’re well.

Your voice arrives like Grandpa’s, on time.
I fight for this sound every day of my life.
The dark one, Krishna, walking with Jesus,
together in translations at winter solstice,
before the ocean, all of us, here,
watching whales in a winter storm.

Jim Bodeen
26 November 2013


Breathing with Karen, Stretching Time


ON REFUSING ALL OF THE SMOOTH STONES
IN THE RIVER’S TUMBLING JUST OUT OF TOWN

Maybe what remains is the elegy.
This odd turn towards the camera
with moving parts.
Seeing the beloved like this
in her one moment.

On the Washington side of the Columbia River
through Stevenson.
Explain that one to Meriweather Lewis.
A day drive.

Over Blewett Pass, Karen asks me
if I want to stop at St. John the Forerunner Monastery
and buy some cheese cake from the nuns.
Like Bly says in his Big Book,
Even your parents can’t believe how much you’ve changed.

When he began lifting fist-sized stones
from rivers, he couldn’t recall, exactly.
It was Sunday. He’d brought grandchildren,
and the first stone came from the glacier’s snout,
shattered glass. He collapsed the riverbed
in his garden, tracking an ancestral story.

Jim Bodeen
26 November 2013


LINES FOR A SOLITARY POET

            —for B

Looking for a way through a lifetime
of the poet’s translated poems,
underlining, lines as cairns
in landscapes of the other,
otherness part of what’s here,
part of what’s lonesome and untold,
part of it, too, lines accumulate
until land and sky come clear.
This is a solitary poet.
He lays down his pen, and as the poem
emerges, the poet himself gets smaller.
It’s not Robert Bly who makes a poet great.
Neither is it the Nobel Prize.
These lines are morning bird songs
from Tomas Tranströmer, his own work
pushing him from the nest.
Discipline of practice, way of solitaries
on birthdays bowing to daily lines.
Stark contrast from the awards dinner,
escapes through bathroom windows.


Jim Bodeen
8 November 2013


MOVEMENT IN THE MOTHERSHIP

In the womb of the Goddess
Breathing is another word for praise

Jim Bodeen
19 November 2013


The Great Mother of the World


RIGHT AWAY AT 3 am


The Great Mother of the World has taken up residency
in the body of my wife, Karen. I have been assigned to take her
wherever she may wish to go. For consenting to this, to be,
among other things, her driver. It is my privilege
to accompany her in the Mothership.
For awhile, perhaps, I was under the illusion
that it was the other way around.
I was a fool to think so. In the language of the world
I would be done for.
Done, as the world calls it, over with.
Right now I'm trying to sleep, and she says,
"Turn on the light. Wake up."
I turn on the light.
She's sleeping on her side, turned away from me.
Actually, she's snoring. "Wake up." she says it again.
"Pay attention. The headache is only temporary."

Jim Bodeen
13 November 2013

MARTIN LUTHER & THE BOY FROM NORTH DAKOTA


THIS IS HE, THE BOY FROM NORTH DAKOTA
LOOKING STILL AT BETHLHEM LUTHERAN CHURCH

“Whatever stains you, you rubbed it into yourselves”
       Seamus Heaney, Bann Valley Eclogue

Our yard, fenced, full of lilac,
large enough to pasture the pony.
Front doors of the white-board church
across the street, large as our front porch.

Jesus at Gethsemane, my mother’s tears,
farmers in suit and tie, wearing hats.
My father’s blue feet in a bowl of hot water.
Looking in and out, ever-present God.

Jim Bodeen
6 November 2013


“YOU WILL RECEIVE AS MUCH AS YOU BELIEVE YOU  RECEIVE…BELIEF 
ALONE IS THE BEST AND ONLY CONDITION…” MARTIN LUTHER, 
MAUNDY THURSDAY SERMON, 1518. NO BLESSINGS ON OFFENSIVE 
WAR FROM LUTHER, AND WARS WAGED FOR THE GOSPEL ARE 
WORKS OF THE DEVIL. LIBERTIES TAKEN IN PARAPHRASING BY 
HEIKO A. OBERMAN IN HIS BOOK:  LUTHER, MAN BETWEEN GOD AND 
THE DEVIL, ARE EQUALLY INTOXICATING AND FRUSTRATING. HE 
MUST HAVE BEEN IN HIS LATE 60S WRITING THIS BOOK, AND HE WAS 
DEAD AT 70. IMMORTAL. EVERYONE IS EXPOSED 
IN HIS UNWORTHINESS. LOOK INSIDE WHAT CRACKS MEDIEVAL:


Obermann crosses into Luther with gusto.
And Luther falls into the confusion of the last days.
At table with a genuine folk Bible.
A folk Bible. “We are only beggars.”
What would he have done without the devil?
The new layman is an old monk.

The 95th thesis: be confident entering heaven
through tribulations rather than false security.
True theology rejects the urge for power.
Take in the food, not its meaning.
This alien faith separates Luther.
The reddish brown magisterial beret.

Not from Saul to Paul, but from the world to the monastery.
The illustrious Black Monastery.
A wanderer between two monastic factions.
Time and again, led where he did not wish to go.
God is closer to me than I am to myself.
Resorting to the German; Latin being one cool remove.

A word could be translated in very different ways.
The alien word goes to the root.
The alien word is the Gospel which is not my own.
My knowledge does not suffice if I do not rely on the alien word.
I cannot trust my own conscience.
Odd statements of despair needing the other.

I do nothing but receive, but I must spend a lifetime
dealing with this, turning treasure in my hands again and again.
Ordinary water. New layman in the old monk.
Method in the invective in the battle against slander.
The protest against merciless fathers.
The historian opposes the poet with all his might.

Luther can be seen as a follower of Bernard of Clairvaux.
A reform catalog lacking any claim to eternal validity.
A monk proclaiming last days, not a modern age.
Occupying places only as strangers or pilgrims.
The elephant in the room being the Third Reich.
God everywhere. But God being here is not

God being here for you. No career path to Rome.
The divinely noble business of marriage.
God-present in sexual instinct.
Shunning wisdom and moral strivings.
Make love to yours while I make love to mine.
Profession and vocation. Walking the narrow way.

Not a straight gate. The painful way
opens when I’m torn from my own conscience—
the one seeking peace in its own holiness.
A Huckleberry on a raft.
Down river raft-running with God.
Burning detritus in campfires as we go.

Jim Bodeen

Days of the Dead, 2013

The Algebra of Yes and No


GOVERNED BY OTHER RULES

The left-hander’s eye
locates the blade of the chainsaw
so close to his leg

Jim Bodeen               
5 November 2013


MAKING DOCUMENTS

The body itself
Eat the food, not the idea
Small trees in winter

Jim Bodeen
5 November 2013


THE FALL OF YES

Stunning certainty
Before experience
Being here for you

Jim Bodeen
3 November 2013


The Holy Yes and the Holy No

Say no to stay in town.
Say yes to get out of town.
Brought up to say yes.
Yes everyday for years.

Say yes and go to work.
Say yes and go to war.
Making the mistakes of yes.
All the mistakes saying yes can make.

The people who know:
That guy has trouble saying no.
Yes takes you so many places.
Coming back from war

knowing I had to learn about no,
first saying yes to Karen.
The great yes.
Then went on saying yes.

Yes to Christ (head-truth).
First said no.
Only premonitions.
No to the heart.

Yes and no.
Yes in the face of no.
No in the face of yes.
Only in the head.

Yes until Yes was exhausted.
Had nothing left. No yes. No no.
Said yes when my body said no.
Yes until it falls.

No came down and saved me.
The great no. The no of refusal.
The no that says enough.
Poet of yes and no.

Apprenticed.
Into a room every day,
five times a day,  yes to others.
The practice yes.

The practice of yes.
The lifetime of yes.
Yes to Her.
Yes I had to say saying no to myself.

When the no came She let me go.
She did. Now, She said,
I want you to say no.
Say no until it’s yours.

Say no to others.
Say no.
Say no to everything else.
Say no to others so you can say yes to the poem.

You will never work for anything else again.
Ever. As long as you say no.
Say no to everything that is not the poem.
The poem will be there if you say no.

This is the great refusal.
This is the great no.
Another form of apprenticeship.
The next step.

Jim Bodeen
29 October 2013-1 November 2013

All Our Brown-Skinned Angels and the Day of the Dead with Raul Sanchez (...



Raul Sanchez combines two spirit rivers, poetry and altars, while making  his own spirit quest as a seeker.  Born in Mexico City, living there until the age of 12, his path has taken him to a year in India, and a deep river devotion to the poem. He is one of the liberators for brown angels everywhere.

When Light Entered the Room





















THE POETRY READING ON THE DAY OF THE DEAD

Taller de Poesía en el Día de los muertos, para Raúl Sánchez

The best reading of the day came
after everyone had left and gone home.
Parents were tired and children had school in the morning.
One young couple sat through the first set
as if they were intrigued. My friend stayed
as long as she could and read a Levertov poem
filled with marigolds and set in Viet Nam
during the time of the American war. She read
for the Vietnamese poet in Japan
undergoing radiation treatment.

When everyone left, Rául stepped onto the stage
and as I looked up at him in the room
empty but for sweepers, light filled the side of his face.
The ancestors had arrived. Light stormed the entrance.
Raúl found his voice feeling their presence
and he read that poem before his father entering
to hear his son read. Raúl’s voice soars
recalling the bracero of the 1940s enrolling his son
in a private school so he won’t have to go north
as a seasonal worker, leaving his family.

Everyone had left. We could feel them inch closer,
sitting before us, ignoring the table set for them,
and Raúl reading his fine poem of his father’s vision,
his father nodding, bien hecho, you couldn’t hear him,
you had to see it through the light in the room.

Jim Bodeen
29 October 2013

BEING IN THE RIGHT SPOT WITH GOD

If I have it just so I can go to coffee,
but who’s to say?
                                    First, I must write
about Kierkegaard’s refusal.

Only from a layman, he said.
Only from a layman.

Wouldn’t you like to take communion?
the bishop asks.

Yes, but only from a layman.

He knows that’s against the law, Kierkegaard does.
He’s dying. He knows that too.
Not from his pastor brother.
Not from his pastor friend.

No. He will refuse it, Kierkegaard will,
saying no to anyone with a Lutheran state collar.

Jim Bodeen
29 October 2013

Days of Nothing but Time


UNTIL NOW

He has not looked inside the hope chest
since his wife died a dozen years ago
and now he is an old man himself.
Take it with you, will you, he tells my wife.
Here’s where she got married, he says.
Didn’t you get married at the same time, she says.
I guess I did, he says.
We only had that one argument.
I wish I had done more.
Look at that, somebody’s hair,
he says, opening the envelope.
Does it say? No, it doesn’t.

The black and white photos.
Black carbon paper.
His daughter’s report card.
The one who died early.
The silences recorded by the video camera.
The invisibility of the other.
I’ve never looked at some of this stuff, he says.
I’m not going to take this, she says,
but I’ll pull out a few pictures.
Look at these baby shoes, she says.
They’re your kids’ shoes.
Are they?
My wife holds up a snapshot for the camera.
The hope chest is a forest of cedar.
Time was different before the skies opened.
Now there is nothing but time and sky.

Jim Bodeen
26 October 2013



"Not for Itching Ears" Pastor Ron Marshall's Soren Kierkegaard



Ron Marshall's life-work as a pastor includes his personal walk with Soren Kierkegaard. His commitment to Kierkegaard includes strong images for men and women in congregations...who also "have wings and imaginations." Wings and the imagination soar with Marshall, and contend with torpor in the pew and in the pulpit.

BEFORE THE GREAT REFUSAL


WHAT HE FOUND OUT ON THE WAY

Born to an earlier tradition
in an isolated land, and orphaned,
he was raised by those following Christ,
Jesus people, really, if that could be said,
those who were isolated and exiled themselves.
They did not know the child.
They did not know his earlier life,
or the tradition of the people
he came from. He felt at ease
in belonging to remnants.

He attached himself to the discipline of the poem.
He apprenticed himself to a life with scripture.
With words brought forth from the world.
He believed Jesus to be his brother
and he believed Jesus understood.
He didn’t think he was Jesus believing this.
Neither was he at odds over what they said about Jesus.
The poem, too, was immortal,
and he could not hide his otherness.

Jim Bodeen
24 October 2013

REQUIREMENTS OF THANKSGIVING AND JOY

When they surround themselves with God
the door opens for the poem.
When they surround themselves with poems
the door opens for God.

Jim Bodeen
17 October 2013


WHAT I DON’T KNOW ABOUT POETRY IS SO IMMENSE

Reading the poets, their lives
as well as their poems. Reading
back to front as well as front to back.
I am humbled by witness and way.
The discipline humbles me.
I am drawn, too, by its requisite
lack of discipline. Again and again.
Side by side with the wild.
I bow before the great refusal.
I bow to its silent way.
Silent before its great no.
Silent before the great refusal.

Jim Bodeen
16 October 2013

Capabilities of Water


WHAT HE DOES WITH HIS DREAM

He wants a quiet divorce
and then he has that dream.
…y le pondrás su nombre Jesús.
Any dream makes a mess, no?

¿Cada sueño hace un fracaso?
Joseph brings it out slow
in his dream/breath.
He says yes to what can’t be seen.

Jim Bodeen
12 October 2013


DESERT RIVER RUN

Jesus can ride with us
but no special treatment.
He’d be insulted. Like
anybody else, ok? Pero

también esto está en la Biblia
y tenemos que reconocerlo.
So says el Cubano
Justo Gonzalez,

one of our guides. Karen says
it’s more believable this way.
Nothing unbelievable, I say back.
It’s only unbelievable

because it’s all believable.
Reclaiming reality is theology’s job.
What it is. Jesus,
what say you of the imagination?

This is a basement church.
Ten of us. Two languages.
The poet of late coffee and oranges
talking two ways—

Consciousness and imagination.
He chose imagination.
Wouldn’t I cash in my travel miles
for lyric and wonder.

Jim Bodeen
11-12 October 2013


MEDITATION ON THE LEFT HAND

The left hand makes all the difference for me, every day of my life.
True, it’s awkward in China, and we’re drawn to the Tao,
and the ancient Chinese poets.
But when you put the chopsticks in your left hand
the only thing those around you will see is toilet paper,
and you wiping yourself with your left hand.
Karen and I fight over can openers.
But all Karen’s boy friends were left-handed. And I’m left-handed!
My President and John McCain are both lefties.
There are more left-handers in Alaska than in any other state.
I vote left. I sit on the left side in Church.
I confess to watching right-handers with knives and forks.
It’s so precious. And complicated.
I never quite know what to say about their poems.
And I love left-overs, and the bi-cameral brain.

Roofers say they’ll never get on a roof with ones like us.

International –Left-Hander’s Day. Imagine that.
Isn’t that a bit like poetry month in April?
I was half-way through my life when I discovered this stuff.
It wasn’t as though I didn’t know I was a lefty.
I got to play first base because I was closer to the ball coming my way
from across the infield. Even my glove was special.
So I was picking up things.
It’s true about my penmanship,
my hand coming through wet ink smearing it.
Even as a child I wanted my words on the page to soar.
Somehow I knew. The left hand was to be part of my medicine.

After my dad died and I found the reflexologist,
she asked about Dad wondering about me, 
What’s wrong with your right side?
By now I was discovering left-handed friends.
We wanted one of two things, poetry or God.
It no longer seemed important that I couldn’t replace
the lint filter in the drier without putting it in backwards.
Or keys in locks.
All of Karen’s boyfriends, left-handed.
I was a left-handed lover.
Karen chose me.
Chance and destiny breaking my way.
What we don’t talk about when we talk of the left hand.
All of my inadequacies as blessings.

Jim Bodeen
18 September-7 October 2013

EARLY SATURDAY MORNING, RIVER TIME







        Suiseki Stone by Bob Carlson










EACH SPOKED WHEEL TURNING IN SILENT BEAUTY

That is the seclusion of sunrise
Before it shines on any house.
—Wallace Stevens,


Because he was making way, bringing way,
the voice comes from the river carrying water
along with river stone. Water stone itself
in recognition of its rule: it’s not enough to like a stone.

Add the horticulturist from the university
subjecting trees to everything trees encounter
in nature, amplified: wind, drought, deluge,
to find principles involving development

of the lead branch. Crossing time
in jet planes, young Americans apprentice
themselves to the sensei teaching them
to wash out cups and cut roots, surviving empire.


·          

Reality is spirit’s center, the poet says.
Every poem is a poem within a poem.
Into this matrix, I enter the room,
a man too old to enter a monastery,

holding a tiny tree in a shallow tray.
beginning again.
The young teacher says, Sensei
pointed at the tree. I didn’t speak Japanese,

he didn’t speak English. He pointed
at a branch, and touching it,
holding it flat, straight out,
exclaiming, Pffft—wire it like that,

while turning his arms into tree limbs,
straight, at right angles to the trunk.
Pffft, I said, nodding in recognition
to my teacher, turned into a tree,

my arms as branches angled
at 90 degrees. Mr. Kamamura
looked at my tree, branches like this,
Pffft. Turning away in disgust,

he told his assistant, The worst
wiring of any tree in the garden.
That’s how I learned to wire
branches with movement.

·          

I hold the scissors in my left hand.
Forty years ago a Ficus tree
died on the kitchen table before me.
Two years ago I entered this room

with a small bush, Pyracantha,
cutting the roots, wiring it
to a shallow pot, past lives
before me a running narrative—

a half-century with Karen,
seven decades spent
surrounding myself with the poem.
Each thing returning to its root.

·          

Look at all of the fronts of your tree.
Which ones are the most interesting?
The black pine loves sun and heat.
It gives up strength for its lovely bark.

Don’t cut too many roots
and no excessive bending.
Let’s do a quick one-minute sketch.
OK, I know what your idea is,

I’m trying to follow your narrative
into this branch. What does
Wabi Sabi mean to you?
To me it’s time passing, shortness

of life. It’s a subdued all, low key.
We want the tree to come towards us.
To lean towards us, as in embracing.
Take out what absolutely can’t be used.

Yes. Cleaner. Increasingly sparse.
A little older. We’ll put some wire on
these guys so we can see
what’s going on inside. These

are the tools of length and space.
This branch helps this branch grow.
They all help each other.
A bonsai spends most of its life

being wired. The cost of beauty?
The freedom in discipline?
Shallow and long containers add height.
Shallow pots need to be wide.

Like a rubber band.
Deeper pots need to be wide.
Nitrogen for what’s green.
Potassium for roots.

Nobody actually knows how moisture moves
through trees. Only theories.
Especially with redwoods.
Monterrey Pines are totally fog dependent

with weak roots. As focused
as we are on the apex, we forget
how important it is to set that first branch.
The apex. It’s gone as far as it can go.

The tree exhausts itself to get here.

·          

Handing me keys to our first house
45 years ago, the banker says,
This is a good starter house.

There are many words
for beginners, most of them disparaging,
all of them current, common in usage.

We knew something about humble roots,
setting out to make a house.
The house, the stone, and the tree.

Three children. And we had three children.
The Black Pine stands before me as my life
I will leave without seeing a finish.

Each of the words for beginner
belonging to me. How many stones
have I carried from the river to the garden.

The integrity in stones come from the stars.
I hold a mountain range in my two hands.
The stone is a six-sided temple.

·          

Just as it was literature that brought me here,
it is literature asking the question of inheritance.
Three children, each of them beloved.
Literature is the house where we live.
A house, a stone, and a tree.
The two thousand year old Sequioia
stands, green peace grand.
The stone shows us the gold dust
from a dark star in our fingers.

This is the treasure for the children.
House, stone, and tree.
A portion for each.

Jim Bodeen
7 September—5 October 2013


EARLY SATURDAY MORNING IN OCTOBER

The man who slips in water
wearing his rubber boots
finds out how long it takes
to fill the boot with water.
The imagination can work
with the fact of a wet sock
in a boot. The fire beside me
does not come from the fire place
or a campfire. Yet I am warmed
by Stevens as I put Kierkegaard
by my elbow. The poet says,
God and the imaginer is one.
I suppose the imaginer is God.
Poetry hands me the books
to see what might happen.
Switching languages every so often
because they’re here with coffee.
The left hander can put the hearing aid
in his right ear, but he always turns
the speaker for the left ear
to the world. He can’t do it
any other way. It’s part
of the deal he was given.
The lines are as real as the allergies
causing the old dog to scratch,
scraping away all of her fur.

Jim Bodeen
5 October 2013

Water Falls Straight Down





















THIS IS THE PART OF HERE
THAT SAYS WE’RE ALL GOING IN THE SAME DIRECTION:
A FOUND POEM IN KAREN’S NOTEBOOK

Brown and black, this is a winter-time stone
coming out of the water, coming out of the clouds.
Until it finds its way to go
we need to look at it lots.

Color and shape, rather than absolute
reference place. Clean it up,
because the color is so much of what it is.
Enjoy it and find a story to match.

Push yourself to look for something else.
Rain works so well, because it has so far to fall.
Take the stone. Go from end to end.
See what rises up.

Buddha goes into a rock
to get out of the hypnotic rain
and is delivered into enlightenment.
This stone is just too wild.
It’s like the ocean itself.

There’s the human and the nonhuman.
We’re looking for an edge
that’s right between those worlds.
Gravity takes water straight down.

Jim Bodeen

3 October 2013























YET ANOTHER TRIBUTE TO THE PAST

Water after rain on White River
ran high over the one-man log bridge
and we couldn’t cross. My granddaughter,
disappointed, slept with her one-sided vision,
asking in the morning if the water
might have gone down.
It was the bridge gone,
and water running high
as we walked up river over stones
wrapping us in storm’s aftermath.
We carried our lunch in backpacks
until we found shelter among boulders
large enough to protect us from wind.
Both of us knew the storm’s terror,
and I envied her courage.
Storm had called on her early
to walk through danger.
What I folded into my sandwich
beside the river emerging
from the snout of the mountain’s glacier
comes up this morning from music
after a night-long confrontation
with grace, anger fully present,
holding back its bile.

Jim Bodeen
1 October 2013




We Have Rocks Like That In Our River


STONES IN THE NACHES RIVER

Restlessness of the eternal
won’t be found in these stones.
This is the way to Nina Simone’s soul,
native in ancient waters. Move
with what’s pure and quiet.
Whitman says the days are gods.

All you can count on with your fingers
is here. While folding this morning
into riverbed, the prayer
for unseen practice turns over
with a stone. Here is the word
in bread. It’s all a swim in the pool,
a rock in river time. Stories
all give up their color
in river sounds, and what's far
in my friend’s poems
circle in the eddy.
We’re gleaning now,
entering what's dark and wet
anyway we can,
our daily way
and prayer for practice.

Jim Bodeen
30 September 2013





















A DAY ON THE NACHES WITH KAREN IN THE RAIN

All the rocks rise up
from the river
dressed in rain

If they weren’t greeting us
they were putting new color
into Karen’s scarf

Jim Bodeen

27 September 2013


Carrying the Notebook into the River

BECAUSE HE WAS BRINGING WAY,
VOICE COMES FROM RIVER WITH STONE

Fragments of notes from the Suiseki notebook,
Voice of Bob Carlson taking us into Spokane River
Listening from the side, walking in water
Different ways of doing this, too
One small area or water
Pick them up Turn them over Put them back

Eel River is classic, three tributaries

Hard minerals, looking for anything that will take a polish

Plum blossoms, geisha girls—We’re not looking for pictures of things

Color is what this part of the world is all about

Near, far mountain stones, like the title of a poem

Six-sided art form, really a way



















If the stone is chipped
you have to leave it
or your Magic Mind
will heal it in the river

This is pretty classic material from around here, I’d think

You have to collect what’s here

Patina comes through water and rain
River develops this patina
Go out and rub it once in a while
Patina will develop
Leave them, rub them. Don’t fuss with them

Daiza. Its seat or throne

Sides go in all directions
Front and back
Look for six sides

Maseki is the masterpiece
                                       
When it rains, scrub it out
Do ha is a plateau

Try to find stones that don’t have a lot of breaks
It limits what can happen

Magic Mind—the healing at the river

We prefer stones that want to clasp,
that want to embrace you

One way to look at it is as participant

Suiban is a shallow tray for your rock
with yellow sand, if you’re really Japanese,
you’ll pluck out every dark piece of sand
Subtle stone, you’ll enjoy this for a long time

Every river, every creek, has its own character,
its own muscular movement

Nestle it in the sand, brown and black,
winter time stone, coming out of water,
coming out of clouds

bands of color, speckled holes, keep turning them over
until it finally finds its way to go
we need to look at it lots

Color and shape, rather than absolute
reference places               clean it up
because its color is so much of it

Enjoy it and find a story to match it

I like masculinity
Push yourself to look for something else
Rain works so well because it falls so much farther

Look at that nice little island
surrounded by surf
There’s more here than a problematic shape
Open up the eyes a little

Take the stone, go from end to end, see what rises up

To me, this is a coastal stone

Buddha says, go into rock, get out of rain,
Hypnotic rain delivers him to enlightenment
This stone is just too wild
It’s like the ocean itself

There’s the human and the nonhuman
We’re looking for an edge
that’s right between these worlds
Gravity takes water straight on

Where you rub, where you don’t
Why you rub
My son picked up a stone,
put it in the car,
and it was already shining

Jim Bodeen
Spokane River-Gobi Rattler Room
September 17-25, 2013


THE CHARGED LANGUAGE OF STONE

            —for Earl and Bob Carlson

doesn’t manifest itself on its own.
The music of the universe isn’t something to download.

The charged language of stone
must be brought forth by another.

Walking in the Spokane River, a father and a son.
Sitting on a rock in the river, a man.

The man has an appointment with a tree in the morning
that will keep him from hearing all that will be said.

He is told this much:
The artist is the man who lifts the stone from the water.

The art is in the recognition.
The one who reads the book, writes the book?

The one who carries the language
bearing the music of the universe

must find a way to release it.
In this sense, the man is like a stone?

The stone is the man’s brother.
If only it were that easy to be brother to one’s brother.

Can you polish the dark-enigma mirror
to a clarity beyond stain?

The man sitting on a rock in the river
wears the rubber boots of a fisherman.

He pulls a small notebook from his pocket
and reads what the father-man said in the hotel lobby:

If the stone is chipped you must leave it in the river
before your magic mind can heal it.

The man feels his rubber boots fill with water as he reads.

Jim Bodeen
18-25 September 2013


                                                                                                        


                                                                                                  

Rubbing the Stones
























ONE STORY ABOUT STONE
IN A BONSAI POT FROM THE SENSEI

The stone is a companion of bonsai.
The stone is an older view of nature.

Jim Bodeen
24 September 2013


READING IN THE GOBI-RATTLER ROOM
AFTER PRUNING TREES

The seeker after stone
knows he’s running into time
walking rivers
in his sandals. Here,
all rocks washed,
wet, emerging
from shadowed sunlight,
eyes drop into movements
of sound recognizing old songs.
He finds himself
banking with ancestors.
Part of what he cradles
in his hands is water.

Jim Bodeen

17 September 2013
White River



Sunshine After Days of Rain

ROCK AT MY BACK, SUN ON MY FACE

Sun dries stone from yesterday's rain.
A river of steam rises from White River's
tumbled rock. It's September
and just before I stand
preparing to leave, I pick up
Li Po's Fall Cave poem,
his tears carrying him in his orphaned boat.
This place, the same as his place.
My tears are my tears.
I've been in this place long enough,
but looking again, find myself
unable to move.

Jim Bodeen
7 September 2013


















AFTER LI PO

White River's a stone garden,
a tumbling avalanche bed
for storm-tossed trees.

Don't come here!
It's too wild!

Take your lover to Ohanapecosh.
Even the ancestral forest is framed.

Stay out of White River!

Jim Bodeen
7 September 2013






















THE MAN WHO NEGLECTED HIS ROOTS

The man on the overlook
asks where I’ve been
and I point to the ridge line
emerging above Emmons Glacier.
It’s a bonsai forest.

They won’t stay that way,
he says, short,
with those twisted trunks.
I dug up two of them
40 years ago, watered them
covered with gunny sack.
You’re not supposed to take them;
I planted them by my front door.
Now they’re taller than my house.
My drain’s all twisted with roots.

Sensei says if a tree presents itself
the proper response is to take it,
but if it’s bonsai, cut the roots.
And put it in a pot.

Jim Bodeen
23 September 2013


THE WIND PICKS UP

Turn my back to sun,
shirt off, I sit on rock,
boots among three small trees

Wind picks up
I resist putting on my shirt
and still reading Li Po's last poems
from Mr. Seaton at 70

fall in again with solitaries

Li Po's lonely walk
with Tien Tien Mountain
my boots are as tall as trees
where they rest

Jim Bodeen
8 September 2013


AMONG TINY TREES

Lunch on the ridge
Sandwich built
with salad onion,
lettuce, sweet red pepper--
mayonaise and mustard
Three cooked beets
fresh from Valley
left over from
last night's dinner
sprinkled with sea salt

Jim Bodeen
8 September 2013


MORAINE TRAIL

Parallel to White River
Headwaters from snout of glacier
I stop for tea,
open the notebook,
think of Snyder & Jack,
closer again
nearly forty years,
my brothers coming up
in two days

Notebook safely stowed
in my pack, I unfold
a letter from a friend
carried in my wallet
to write on

Jim Bodeen
8 September 2013