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