0220 HOURS

 

0220 HOURS


            Opening Monday Morning


When I get up to pee,

        dark, dark, dark

when I get up to pee


Dark, dark, dark

        when I come back to bed


Dark, dark, dark

        in the notebook

when it opens



Jim Bodeen

29 October 2024

(BUT, BUT) (NOT SAID) (DON'T READ OUT LOUD)

 

(BUT. BUT) (NOT SAID) (DON’T READ OUT LOUD)


If I am quiet enough

I can hear

everything that is said


I don’t even have to be quiet


        So many languages


Karen speaks to me in color

            in fabric


After she listens


She wraps me in squares of cotton



Jim Bodeen

25 October 2024

THE NEW NOTE CARDS

 












THE NEW NOTE CARDS


He puts an envelope

into the margin of the book

where he wants to begin. To hold it.

He’s written title and author’s name

on a slip of paper, cut to fit,

and he puts that below the passage.

He learned to make note cards

in junior high school 65 years ago.

A scrap of paper has room

for the page number.

He will take his Iphone

and photograph this portion

of the page. He can make

postcards from the image.

He may write something,

a poem, a prayer,

or, simply send it

as it was made, in an email.


Jim Bodeen

23 October 2024

SOMETHING COME FROM NOTHING IN LEFTOVERS

 

SOMETHING COME FROM THE NOTHING

IN LEFTOVERS, DAY-MAKING IN THE TEMPLE

WHERE I’M COMING FROM WORLD COMPOSING


for Klyd Watkins


Waking before the mean time

timeless in the dreaming a kind of timing

and practice, and before the quiet requests

of the toes for movement, the compost

works its warmer ways into those other

extremities of wonder. Yesterday’s cut

peonies, turned once, have had nearly 24 hours

to settle in to dark spaces of revolving

black plastic. These first images of waking

arrive before altered shadow dark ones,

all part of the great messy mix. My friend

laughs his love for me in a poem commenting

on my age, time to turn to other thoughts,

and the 6-inch sliding doors, such

narrow access for the comings and goings

of the world composing itself such

deep down things. These and other

soil-making thoughts disturbing

this morning. Such tiny movement,

you’d think I might be a Feldenkreis

instructor, saying, Go slower. Two

new books (and old books) arrived

and sent. The new from Tennessee,

from Klyd—Feathers, and his own poems,

What Charlie Pride and Ray Acuff Talked About

Before Singing. Klyd is all sound country.

Hear that? Sound country. When he asked

me for feather poems I didn’t have any.

Now I wish I did, what I wrote him. Last week,

maybe longer, turning compost

(in the North Park of the garden)

where the temple is, I remembered

Snyder and his buddies talking about

the horrible garb doctors wear.

What should they wear? One asked

Snyder, they’d been talking about

Mountains and Rivers Forever.

Feathers, he said. Feathers,

they all repeated laughing. Then,

walking with Karen after Feathers

came in the mail, one feather

stops me on the sidewalk, this

bright orange shaft. But beautiful.

Some call this the rachis, this orange stem.

Look, I say to Karen.

This pure orange. And here’s two more,

she says picking them up. I photographed

them in her hands with my Iphone.

Those doctors. Doctors in feathers.

That’s a poem right there. Feathers

go into composts too. Not these.

These feathers go in the mail to Klyd.

Maybe they’ll be book marks, or cairns.

He might use the quills for writing.

Feathers in compost are 90% protein,

15% nitrogen, classified as green.

The science of protein in the form

of keratin, a fiber, is heavy reading.

The feathers in my hand don’t come

from poultry, however. I worry

they might have come from the kill

of the neighborhood cat lurking from

beneath some tree. Banana peels,

cardboard, coffee grounds, carrots.

All of it with falling leaves coming

in this mid-October week and last grasses.

Too much green soon turns to too much

brown, all of it delighting my politics,

my stand. I will make soil. I will get dirty.

This morning there are 26 days before the election.

Baseball playoffs before the World Series,

another source of medicine. What Klyd says

regarding that talk between Acuff and Pride

before the song? They were talking

about baseball. I don’t even know

if they voted. We do know they

were surrounded by bad politics,

and that baseball is a vaccine.


The thing about composting is the listening.

When you’re in there, when you open those bins,

you know everything is included. Everything.

The whole mix. Word comes like that.

Putting something together is dictionary.

Putting something together, like song,

or poem or prayer. Everything you can’t

see goes in. Especially things you can’t see.

Things you don’t even know about go in.

You can’t see it, but you can hear it.

You kind of can. Everything becomes

available for something else you don’t

know about. Right here. Here

might be the place to end this

whatever it is, and grab a shovel.

But it’s not the end either, it’s like

last Saturday, I went to Fruit City

in Union Gap and loaded up.

I bought the smallest of the large cabbages.

It was morning. It was another beginning.

And this cabbage.

Fourteen pounds. Big cabbage. It’s own wonder.

Soup, slaw, sauerkraut. Some for neighbors,

yes. And truth be told, some of it for compost

as much as the kitchen table. Some of this cabbage

for making soil from dirt. A kind of vote

for planet Earth.


Jim Bodeen

9-11 October 2024

BEGINNING THE STUDY OF THE PRESENT














BEGINNING THE STUDY OF THE PRESENT


After cycling, the coffee. After

cycling, Karen and coffee. After the lonely

night with Bonhoeffer, sunshine,

and Karen says, “Should we go get our shots?”


Yes, Let’s go. Flu and Covid. I carry

two copies of Harper’s—two essays

I read separately, ending summer, beginning

fall, each read twice, and a third time


at the pharmacy, 22 days before the election.

Yesterday’s Men, the Death of the Mythical

Method by Alan Jacobs, and Glimmers

of Totality, on Fredric Jameson at 90,


by Mark Greif, spelling correct. Quick

note: Jameson just died, on the third, after

a fall. Yesterday’s men, mine really, our

generation—Northrop Frye, Joseph Campbell--


didn’t know Giam Battista Vico, writing in 1725--

shorten the reign of barbarism. Jameson’s a Marxist,

his two characteristics of America: hypocritical

and shallow. After the second read,


transferred favorite sentences to notebook,

downloaded the e-book (couldn’t wait):

Inventions of a Present: The Novel

in its Crisis of Globalization. Here’s a sentence


from Greif: “Every intervention, rereading,

and retrospection by Jameson is about the present

and the wish to shape the future.” Our pharmacy’s

still locally owned, believe that? Karen takes


both shots in her left arm, and I take mine

in the right. Tieton Village Pharmacy. We’ve

known the pharmacist for years. Two years ago

when we had Covid at Christmas, he got us


going with Paxlovid. Karen quit after two pills.

I asked our guy to talk about virus and bacteria,

both in the context of Covid and composting.

“It’s been years since I had a microbiology class,”


he says, “bacteria’s more complex in cell structure.”

I just want to know how the worms get into the compost.

From Tieton we stop at Ace on our way home.

Karen wants purple and orange LED lights


for the porch during Days of the Dead.

White neighborhoods coming from Halloween

and commercial costume parties are catching up,

especially with skeletons—aka calaveras,


in the dominant culture in our town. I’m not

the Stage Manager. North America’s importing

ten-foot skeletons that fill lawns and houses--

no places to store these bones so large


there’s no place to store them. One neighbor

dresses hers according to the seasons. No one

knows the ancestors here, and to take them down

she’d have to take bedrooms from her children.


Skeletons come from computers don’t eat first.

How could these people ever tell a story?

Karen’s anxious to get back to her quilt.

Let me tell you what happened last night.


That night read with Bonhoeffer: Living

in community. “Whoever cannot stand being

in community should never live alone.”

A year like this.


Just after 2, my arms reach out, she’s gone.

Karen, I shout from bed. “I had an idea,”

she says from the other room. “I want to put

the chain fence behind Chuck’s portrait.”


Chuck’s a baseball coach. Women’s Fast Pitch

at the college. A memorial quilt. His wife died.

He brought by a stack of jerseys his arms

couldn’t hold. Karen’s been dreaming this


documentary into art for five months.

“You’re going to put a chain around Chuck?

How is that a vision?” Now we’re both up

walking around fabric. My brother’s


coached baseball for half a century.

How the day starts from dreaming. From

Jameson. Jameson’s goal: If you want to be

a fully dialectical thinker, you can’t be satisfied


with just the statement of one side.”

Nearly the size of a bedspread, Karen says

Chuck can never put it there. “He has dogs,”

This must be hung, it’s a statement about time.


Jameson’s voice is one of courage, implacable,

“...aware of the degree to which radical

efforts of late capitalism have been

conservative and traditionalist.”


Converted and re-functioned.

“He Names the System We’re Still Fighting,”

His obituary in The Nation headlines.

The Marxist is never safe he learns


after he champions a writer who turns

him into the FBI. “For, to be sure," Jameson writes in

Inventions of a Present, “our bodies themselves

are sick and poisoned with all the industrial waste


of the market civilization, which we relive

in the taste in our mouths…” And no one is better

his obituary states, than Jameson. He remains.

Today is National Indigenous Day,


and despite her fame, America doesn’t know

the Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. How could it recognize

her poem, Remember, when put on Facebook?

22 billion dollars is what it will cost Los Angeles


to end homelessness in a decade, L.A. Times reports.

45,000 homeless in the city. 29,000 unsheltered.

Less than 7 billion budgeted. Some want less expensive

strategies. In Seattle, Danny Westneat reports


in the Seattle Times that the Hope Factory’s tiny homes

sit empty where they’re built, 500 of them hammered

by volunteers, sent out as “colorful, 100-square foot

missionaries to get people off the ground.”


No one has a straight answer, he reports. Some like them

too much. Some call them shacks in Shantytowns.

The Hope Factory. In Yakima we have Camp Hope,

and tonight is our turn to serve dinner. Pulled pork


sandwiches, barbecue sauce, cole slaw, home-made

cupcakes. West Coast homelessness. Camp Hope

dinners in the army green tent. Marion tells me

to watch how much slaw I load on my spoon


as we’re expecting more people due to cold

weather. Sunny and beautiful, but cold.

Covid shots, flu shots, egg shells in compost

aids photosynthesis, strengthen cell walls in plants.


Jim Bodeen

14-16 October 2024








HE SHOWS HIS GRANDDAUGHTER THE COMPOST BINS

 

HE SHOWS HIS GRANDDAUGHTER

THE COMPOST BINS ON SATURDAY


He had been out of garbology

since he left the mountain retreat village

that broke everything down. Now

that he was back into it


he remembered cardboard

counted as brown. He would

bring himself up to speed.

His own composting,


Put something together,

from Old French,

make plant manure, he tells her,

and she looks at him


to show she didn’t understand.

Plant shit, he says,

and she smiles.

It’s kind of a honey bucket.


You brought this pizza

in a cardboard carton.

Wet it in the sink and it’s soft

enough to tear in 20 minutes.


It goes into the compost

tomorrow on top of the grass.

This makes our planet younger.

Cardboard counts as brown.


Jim Bodeen

12 October 2024

THREAD OF CREATION

THREAD OF CREATION

HEART CENTER DREAMING


          --for Karen


Any glimpse enough

Making documents of cloth

Around weathered arms


Anywhere to anywhere

Unleashing real existence


Jim Bodeen

12 October 2024