TELL IT AGAIN, GRANDPA



HAND THEM THE CAMERA.
LET THEM ASK THE QUESTIONS.
 
Ski with the kids.
No one knows what will happen.
All of the known structures fell
in that one dream of calving

icebergs, decades ago.
Traveling evanescence tumbling.
It’s like anything else
this real, it will be denied

in practical terms. Practical
ones, practicing what will reason.
Why, why, why, why.
Listen to Paul Simon sing.

Forty days gets oohs and ahs
from the Bible itself.
We stop for water and bathroom breaks at 40.
What we’re counting is numbers

on the backs of chairlifts.
They give Jesus credit for 40.
He’s been out there 2000 years.
These kids count to 50,

and stop for hot chocolate.
Call it play if you like.
Children playing with real lives.
Given worlds made by adults.

Jim Bodeen
27 March 2013

















GRANDFATHER ON THE MOUNTAIN WITH CHILDREN

He knows he's always on probation.

Jim Bodeen
25 March 2013
 
RENUNCIATION?

Where the world gets made.

Jim Bodeen
25 March 2013


THIS TIME, SWEETLY

After the great No,
which is a gate
to the wonder of renunciation,
everything you believed
falls away. 

Ski with the kids.

Jim Bodeen
24 March 2013

















TELL IT AGAIN, GRANDPA

Big Horn Sheep lick salt
on Highway 12 stopping the car
on our way down the mountain.
Dheezus, my granddaughter,

sleeps in the back seat.
She had a good day on skis.
Tell me again, Grandpa,
the time when Uncle Tim

couldn't hold his pee
on the way up the mountain.
Tell me, Grandpa,
how you gave him

the empty pop bottle
and he filled it up
and the pee kept coming.
I pull the car to the shoulder

of the road. It's hailing.
The sheep are one more surprise.
Dheez made every turn I asked her
to make. I told the story

of my son peeing into the pop bottle
every time Dheez asked me to tell it.
Tim was 5, just like you Dheezus.
He said the pee got real warm

when it wouldn't stop
and it came out the top of the bottle.
He said, Dad, the bottle's full
and the pee just keeps coming.

The sheep step off the highway
looking at me from trees. My camera
is a telephone. Call it up
on days all bottles are empty.

Jim Bodeen
March 23, 2013


 

Spring Light Sprung



·   
       
Spring sun sprung
Outback backing light
Sourcing self wind-chimed

Jim Bodeen
21 March 2013

 ·

BASEBALL, MOM, GOD


HOW MOM CONTRASTS AS A BASEBALL FAN
WITH THE FAMOUS PROFESSOR WHO WROTE HIS BOOK
ON BASEBALL AND GOD ALL THE WHILE
HEADING UP THE UNIVERSITY, PRACTICING LAW,
TEACHING A CLASS, EVEN WHILE ADVISING DEBATE COACHES

Once I asked Mom about the man
who sat in front of her at the stadium.
What does he do, Mom?
Jimmy, what an awful thing to ask at a ballgame.

Jim Bodeen
20 March 2013


OPENING CONVERSATION WITH MY SISTER
ON RECEIVING HER GIFT OF THE BOOK
ABOUT BASEBALL AND GOD

It arrived as a suggestion on my Amazon account.
I have never ordered a baseball before.
I also want to tell you that right after Mom died,
we took the boat to Des Moines for two nights.
I had two glasses of wine knocked out of my hands.
Craig described it as other worldly.
No one was around.
They flew out of my hands.
I think the book came from Mom.

This is a poem.
I’m going to steal it.
I’m not quite sure how.
It doesn’t matter whether you set alarm or not.

You can’t steal what is given to you.
 
I’ve been reading theology all winter.
Skiing the mountain, reading Luke’s Gospel.
I’m afraid I sound closer to God than I am.
And now it’s baseball season
and I’m still skiing. Mom’s in my ear.
How do I really feel about pitchers and catchers.
You’ve gone too far this time, Jim.
It’s snowing and blowing on the mountain.
Yet another friend has told me
I’m not going to be skiing forever.
Someday this poem will let me go too,
but I will remain inside the Magnificat singing and weeping.
She’d shake her head if I mentioned Mary.
Every time I talked with Mom about God, she shuddered.
Her rejection of the church was never a rejection of Jesus.
It did coincide with her season tickets to the Mariners.
It gave me great satisfaction to call it
the failure of Christianity.
I haven’t been to a ball game since Mom died,
and before that, not after her move six years ago.

The wine flew out of your hands you say.
Craig calls it right, otherworldly.
And the book comes from Mom.
I can’t steal what is given you say.
Let me try and thank you. My report on the book
comes from Mom’s seats in Section 331.
Mom is the umpire calling balls and strikes.
What’s in or out of bounds, not my concern.

Jim Bodeen
20 March 2013
 

Part of the Mountain Sustaining Us


EVEN ON SKIS

Watching Mom
Travelling like Lucille

Jim Bodeen
17 March 2013

 
PATTERNS OF LUCILLE

He watched his mother closely

Jim Bodeen
16 March 2013


OUR MOUNTAIN HOUSE

Small and vast
My wife and I
keep running into each other
After many years

putting dishes in the sink

Jim Bodeen
15 March 20123


THESE OPEN NOTEBOOKS

He wanted to show the mountain
as the other that was always with him.
Always with us. Even alone.
He wanted to take the mountain
away from those who said
you always had to come down.
He wanted to be as far from the empire
and as close to the empirical.
He didn’t want to go anyplace.
He wanted to walk through it all. 
           
This was his practice
and his way of praying.
He wasn’t asking for anything.
This is the life he was given
the day he was given the word.
The day he accepted it.
He wasn’t sure what it was at first.
Things became clearer
during that last interview
when he brought out his notebook
with the photos and the poems.
His notebook as a kind of public symbol.
Setting it before the university
on the coffee table.
Showing his pictures.
Showing his poems.
The man in the tie began to smile,
and then to laugh.
He kept on going.
“Look at this one.”
“Can I read you this.”

It was even worse
with professionals in robes.
They didn’t ask.
They just kept saying,
“You have to come down
from that mountain.”
“You can’t stay up there forever.”
Moses in chains.
Moses before the land of milk and honey.
Moses in that one moment of anger.

Given all this.
Birdsong. Bonsai.
That young man and what he did that one week.
Just this.
Coming at him, walking into it.
Nothing level or plum.

Jim Bodeen
13 March 2013

Charged to Remember

THE WAY IT IS FOR HIM

He was against forgetting
as much as he was for it.

Jim Bodeen
12 March 2013


















STOP SIGN AT CUSTER AND FAIRBANKS
AVENUES IN MY TOWN KIDDYCORNER
TO GARFIELD ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
WHERE MY DAUGHTER TEACHES

Nobody stops at this stop sign.
They drive right on through.
Just like it wasn’t there.
Between the T and the O.
The smiling face of Alfred E. Neumann.
Me worry? What is that?
And the hand with the finger
pointing at the joker. That too.
Of course it’s been tagged
with the gang banger’s
family signature. But nobody stops.
Nobody talks about it.
Until last week, in Tacoma.
A young man who’d just won a scholarship,
he was talking about the day he was jumped out
of his gang in the parking lot of the school
where my daughter teaches. Schools nowadays
go into lockdown practicing for killers
in their schools, expecting the worst.
But this is a story about freedom.
A scholarship. Going to college.
Bumped out of the gang
after the cousin dies in his arms
saying, Go to school.
Last conversation I had
with someone I could call a brother.
This is the lockdown story the school never heard.
We took pictures together,
I asked him about the stop sign.
Alfred E. Neumann, he said,
Yeah, I know that sign.
That was my old neighborhood.
That parking lot. I was bloody and broken.
I dropped to the ground.
I was free. Out of the gang.
I no longer lived in fear.

Jim Bodeen
1 March—9 March 2013
















STOP--THE MOVIE THAT STARTS AT THE STOP SIGN

















CHARGED TO REMEMBER

Because the State Supreme Court
told lawmakers they must fully fund education,
Republicans want to cut the court in half
and have justices draw straws
to see which ones will go. They say

those salaries will pay for lots of teachers.
Yakima County Sheriff, Ken Irwin                ,
says the American people drew the line
in the 1930s against machine guns
during those bank robberies,

but that’s where the line remains,
he says, defending semi-automatic weapons.
Yesterday my wife and I drove
into the lower valley to visit our old pastor
Harold Sigmar, in his mid-90s. We took

him out for a hamburger and one beer.
He directed us along the Yakima River
and I returned his Bonhoeffer book underlined
and written in margins for his commentary.
I can still make him laugh but frankly

I wasn’t very funny. He moved me
talking of his daughters and their caretaking.
We share four decades plus, and it’s documented.
My friends are mostly hermit scholars,
poets, monks, holy men, odd

only in the way we tell a story. Our job,
such as it is, is to speak truth as we see it,
far, as we are, from power.
Little fictions on our take of things.
We’re given to early rising.

Birdsong out my window right now.
After seeing my old friend, I stopped
at a nursery and bought a tree,
lovely Kousa Dogwood from Korea.
I don’t make anything up.

Jim Bodeen
8 March 2013










Two Epithalamions




EPITHALAMION FOR KRISTA & BOB

“This marriage, a moon in a light-blue sky.”
            Rumi

Two warriors, one man,
one woman, left home

in search of the other.
They return to us now,

two faces
beaming light.

Jim Bodeen
12 February 2013


OUTSIDE INSIDE/INSIDE OUTSIDE 
 
            for Terry and Jane

“Nothing holds still in this endless process of sincerity.
It is possessed always of a restless hunger.”
        —David Hinton, Hunger Mountain

Once in a room named after a rattlesnake
Terry and I lit a clay pipe filled with Mountain Smoke
passing the pipe between us talking of desire.
Karen’s dad had given her rattlers
in a jewelry box we kept in the kitchen junk drawer
for 30 years. We moved, and moving changed
everything. My jeweler placed the rattles
in an assemblage and hung it on the wall
to ward off evil. About the same time,
Jane hired a man with truck and crane
to bring a broken piece of andesite,
a million year old rock—they dropped it in our front yard
to anchor us in our beginnings.
Last week the law changed
and here we are, assembled
adding 27 years of love to the weight of justice
in a simple act of saying yes.
Every gesture in the poem is wild
and we find ourselves bewildered again.
Isn’t this wild, we say, as if we were part of the poem,
like we are part of this marriage,
new, beginning, like Terry once said,
amateurs, from the root ama, to love,
lovers beginning. Isn’t this wild!
What we talk about when we talk about love.
What don’t we talk about is more like it,
imagining this poor, humble word, marriage,
made new in vows,
before the community according to law.

Jim Bodeen
12-12-12

 

                                                 

FRESH WATER WELL-WITCHED



THERE’S MORE: THE SON
STILL REVEALING OURSELVES TO HIM,
AND MORE AGAIN,
OURSELVES TO EACH OTHER
 
Grief cascading belief
each breath a miracle

disbelieving its own fact,
impossibility of arrival

Great gulps of grieving
waterfall, plummeting

Did all this happen that fast

Can the best of a family story
be told in one week
I think it can

Jim Bodeen
February 27-4 March 2013

GIVEN

Not something known
Not manufactured
Here, not here

Jim Bodeen
March 1-3, 2013


ON TYLER’S TIME

For whenever the hero stormed through the stations of love,
Each heartbeat intended for him lifted him up, beyond it; and,
turning away, stood there, at the end of all smiles, transfigured.
           Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sixth Elegy

 For Tyler Johnson 7-26-1981 / 2-19-2009
 
He spends New Year’s with his brother,
already called to language and the sea.
He dreams the world inside Maple Valley forest.
He dreams Madrid, becoming Madrileño
waiting for the train at Atocha Station.
He dreams Colombia, carrying his books,
waiting for Kelli. They sail the wild
North Coast of Honduras. They take
their parents to their wedding in Las Vegas
one family celebrating young love in guayaberas.

He rises in the dark with Kelli
on Thursday and takes his wife
to the hospital to begin the work
of bringing their daughter into the world.
He leaves her to further his mission.
We have come to witness and to validate.
In another hospital, he enters the tunnel
of the MRI. The tumor inside his head
has been crowding his ideas,
interfering with his vision. He emerges
and sits before another physician
who fits him with a face mask to protect him
from the radiation that is coming.
His oncologist will talk with him now.
But he has bigger work to do,
And time. He returns to Kelli
in the other hospital and washes up.
He puts on the blue clothes of creation.
He brings his daughter, Evelyn, into the world.
He cuts the umbilical cord.
His work still isn’t done.
He will hold and feed her.
He will bring his wife and daughter home.

They need to find her middle name.
Is it chance or fate that lands on Lucilia?
Evelyn Lucilia, both names meaning light—
Light squared. Light doubled.
This week they will greet friends,
Take pictures, make movies, tell stories.
They will get it all done in a week.
Seven days is all they need.
A life time’s work in seven days.

Blessings on this life.
Blessings from Tyler.

Jim Bodeen
24 February 2009


FRESH WATER WELL-WITCHED
 
  —for my sister Vonnie

The monk builds purity
into the word
building on hopelessness

What keeps coming up
for me in dreams
is what he did, that young man

that last week
he was with us—
the reality of wonder
 
What the monk says
is this
When all hope is gone
 
left with hopelessness
what remains
is purist hope 

No bucket holds
What water
bubbles in the well

Jim Bodeen
26 February 2013