Completing the Work

DELIVERANCE

Driving all week to get here

it doesn’t take five minutes

for questions to surface,

lining up like ghosts at Christmas.

This is the hall of innocence

before the oil boom dreamtime child.

Tell me, confuse the time. No one

knows you here, you claiming

need for undercover.

I notice you didn’t stay under long

before coming up for air.

You thought you’d take

a few pictures, make a report?

The word redemption surfaces?

No need to drill?

This place is off-place, no where

to you, bushwacker. You’ll always

be a child running through a living room

in someone’s silent 8 mm movies here.

Voice asking, Who’s that?

Wayne & Lucille’s boy, a voice

from a sofa says, Myra Homiston’s

daughter, she married Wayne Bodeen

who ran the elevator, even

the elevator’s gone. This is the prairie

during the oil boom. This is the Kaprieva house.

These are Great Northern tracks.

You can’t track them.

This is the state that names the town lost.

Everything here is gone for one like you.

Coteau d’ Missouri is a land feature

belonging to geology. Even the train

depot is gone. Ones who play by rules

put pressure on the town itself.

Live people don’t understand, do they?

Sun will come up soon. Quarter moon.

Your grandparents buried here.

Your father’s brother, the twin,

pulled to his grave on a sled, a child.

Those who live here still claim

innocence—back door claim.

The mayor takes sales tax money

from oil and builds a few sidewalks.

There’s no grocery store in town.

Farmers says, We’ve got it all now.

We’ve got everything here.

One in four people come to work.

The other three bring trouble.

Leave the key in a combine now

and somebody will drive it into a slough.

The other one brings meth and prostitution.

Drug cartels operate from man camps.

We have everything here.

This morning the town has you.

You were a boy in this town.

Born in time of innocence.

Railroad tracks at both ends of town

as boundaries. Tribal boundaries,

and this was tribal chance. You have

those memories, real as any fact.

Child in the days before vaccines.

We have everything here, they say,

meaning, We have all kinds of trouble.

We have all you see on television news.

You listen. You have come for this.

To listen. And beauty before the eye.

Cat tails in roadside ponds.

Spring of antelope in fields.

But not innocence. Not that.

Here, you were given the gift of darkness.

You saw it all before it arrived.

Darkness was here, itinerant.

You’re here for a short time.

Write that trouble into your notebook.

Here there’s enough already.

You’re here to witness and praise.

Jim Bodeen

16-17 October 2015

Bowbells North Dakota

City Park

WAKING IN THE PARK OF MY BIRTH

Parked under the water tower

proclaiming, Bowbells,

train whistles on the Great Northern tracks.

It’s Saturday morning.  Mid-October,

I don’t know a handful of people

in this town, county seat of Burke County,

Railroad bureaucrats named the town

after a bell somewhere in London,

according to one story. One story has it

my life would have been different here,

and I’ve followed that thread

all my life making it so.

Jim Bodeen

17 October 2015