VORTEX!

EXPERIENCE APPRENTICESHIP

How one works  

depends upon

how one can work.

Where one is

and resources for slowing down.

When you can go slow

and for how long.

Can you stop.

And can you stay.

How long can you wait.

Because you have to keep moving.

Movement makes it possible, too.

What can be absorbed.

Stop and go.

Set and release.

Spaces in between

where vortex goes.

Vortex swirling.

Here now

we have seven nights

with bed and kitchen.

A detachable car.

Internet connections.

Museums, pink jeeps, and guides.

National monuments with storyboards.

Exile, voluntary and involuntary.

Volunteer storytellers.

Bookstores in National Parks

with the best books.

At Montezuma's Castle,

I have a choice. Stay with Kachina dolls,

take these books, carefully assembled here,

or, from Images of America,

expensive and superior local history?

How much energy available? To me?

I take the book on Sedona,

where we're driving to. Best history

on place I haven't been to yet.

Sandstone city named after a man's wife.

Taking it with these questions.

Will it open for me? And how?

Whose voice will it be.

In Sedona, after lunch, I try.

It doesn't work. But the jeep ride guide,

Pete, the one who says

I have new medications,

they're working and kicking in,

taking us over these rocks,

gives me the voice I need,

a half dozen details,

and a way into the book.

This is vortex for me this morning,

a swirling funnel of images

from yesterday, gathered mostly by others,

over time, thousands of years with people,

millions with the landscape,

gathered for me today

in luxury setting with the best coffee

in the world. It's all working.

Pete says this is his third day

on the job. Let's go.

Believe me. Vortex. A mass

of whirling fluid or air,

especially a whirlpool or whirlwind.

That fault line!

"We were caught in a vortex of water.

"We were in a pink jeep driving up red sandstone

"We were in a whirling vortex of smoke

Merging in traffic.

Traffic of book, ideas, voices.

Stopped in time, before time and after.

Dust from ocean floor raised by sheets

of tectonic plates into mountains

and worn down again. Cyclones,

eddies, maelstroms swirling.

Black hole of creation.

Vortex of the poem,

Ezra Pound

That one. That vortex.

A century long poem made new

triggered by a man driving a jeep.

Vortex is the art of movement itself.

A single image from ten thousand

daily frames, the swirl

of ecstatic sobriety

one man walking with one woman

over time's recording.

The practice!

Jim Bodeen

Sedona/Scottsdale, AZ

30 November 2017