PUMICE FOR THE TINY ROOTS

QUOTING GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS

“Employ money as a weapons system. Money can be ammunition.”

               General David Petraeus, from Matthieu Aikins,     

               “The Bidding War," The New Yorker, March 7, 2016

It works the other way too.

Withholding money.

Withheld from one’s own people

it's a revolutionary act.

An invisible bullet.

Nerve gas.

Jim Bodeen 

5 March 2016

AFTER RE-POTTING TWO YAMADORI PINES

COLLECTED FROM PINE GRASS FLATS, PLACING THEM

SECURELY INTO CHINESE CERAMIC BEFORE SPRING EQUINOX,

THE BONSAI APPRENTICE SITS, AND READS, ENCOUNTERING

THE FOLLOWING SENTENCES IN THE NEW YORKER,

FOR THE WEEK OF 7 MARCH 2016

“The battle for Aleppo, which began in 2012, has left tens of thousands of people dead

and large parts of the city depopulated.”[1]

“America’s war in Afghanistan, which is now in its fifteenth year, presents a mystery: How could so much good will have achieved so little? Congress has appropriated almost eight hundred billion dollars for military operations in Afghanistan; a hundred and thirteen billion has gone to reconstruction, more than was spent on the Marshall Plan, in postwar Europe.”[2]

“Elsewhere Anchises,/ fatherly and intent, was off in a deep green valley…

but seeing Aeneas come wading through tbe grass,…

and Aeneas reaches for his father…

Three times he tried to reach, arms around that neck…

reached for in vain,…a breeze between his hands, a dream on wings.”[3]

---

[1] Dexter Filkins, “A Truce in Syria,” The Talk of the Town

[2] Matthieu Aikins,“The Bidding War: How a young Afghan military contractor became spectacularly rich.”

[3] Virgil, translated, from the Latin, by Seamus Heaney, from the Aeneid. Book VI.

Jim Bodeen
4 March 2016


SOIL-MAKING WITH MY GRANDDAUGHTER

Sitting on a plastic bucket

in the gravel yard where big dozers

move rock and logs,

my granddaughter holds

the spade in a pile of pumice.

She turns the blade

emptying tiny white rock

into the screen I hold in two hands.

It looks like panning for gold

to me, too, I say, smaller grains

sifting themselves into a pile

almost like sand. The tiny

roots of the bonsai trees

like the sharp edges

of pumice. Get one more

shovel full. We’ll get out

of here before that giant scoop

lifts us up and throws us out.

Jim Bodeen

4 March 2016.