Storypath/Cuentocamino: : My poet friend says, Say hello to the Vishnu Schist

THIS IS US REAL LIVE ROADRUNNING

--for Rob Prout

Dodge music heading south in a rig

looking for stories my Daddy would've called

real life, I look at Navaho dolls

in a small trading post called Thin Bear.

Karen writes the name of the doll maker,

Lou Ann Paul, in my notebook.

Bob and his wife opened this place

after careers in education and social work.

He's a jeweler, too, and when I take off

my Marty Lovins belt buckle I've worn

for 20 years, he takes off the one he made

from found .22 shells. We photograph them

in my hand and he speaks Navaho,

telling me names of Navaho artists

whose pieces will become part

of Native American diaspora

once they're sold. I know I'm passing

through, that this isn't a neighborhood

I've walked the past 35 years. Still,

I cringe at the word "tourist." When

Karen and I take our young family

to the barrio in Guadalajara, I stand up

and make an after-dinner speech

at Jose Luis' house, the doctor

for every family who knocks on his door.

He pulls me aside and says, Jim,

you just told everybody you're happy

to be here and you're sexually aroused.

Thin bear and traveling music.

I scratch the rash on my ankle

and remember my dermatologist

telling me years ago, No, I don't

open hearts like surgeons.

I like skin. We take an interest

in what comes up from below,

and comfort in the fact that skin

is the largest organ of the human body.

Maybe these poems can serve as snapshots

for just being here, passing through

in a thin tradition. I hold my camera out

over the rim of the Grand Canyon

in a spring snow storm. No railing,

trying to see something

like the beginning of time.

Jim Bodeen

April 23, 2010

Grand Canyon South Rim

A LOVE POEM

Look at the purple flowers,

on the roadside, Karen says,

driving. Karen with the Dead

taking us into Arches.

Snack on the side of the road

in the mothership. Rub Sadie’s belly

with an oatmeal spray. After her swim

in Lake Utah this morning, she sheds

the last of her winter coat. Peanut butter

and jelly sandwich. Tiny herring fillets

on crackers. Karen and the

Estimated Prophet, some whacked-out

California dreamed-out dreamer. Karen plays

Jimmy Row all morning on this big

purple and brown highway.

Karen the Deadhead.

Everything charged. An email comes in

from the city. It’s harder to ride

than drive, I write. Is Utah

the Beehive State, Karen asks

looking at the state highway sign.

Rain drops on the windshield.

The sky’s a great big bulletin board.

I drape Karen’s yellow shawl

over her right shoulder. Sensuous,

rounded formations below the cliffs,

sensuous human bodies linked.

Karen says movies use these formations

for underground worms.

When did she see these movies?

What movies made by who?

Karen brings me the wonder

of her universe. She links to

an older time, the ancients

caring for her, keeping an eye on me.

Easier to punch in words

on a computer than to

write through the tightening

left hand in the notebook.

We play at gassing up talk

after we pass the truck stop

where the gauge I read says, Empty.

Her gauge isn’t empty.

What does your gauge read Karen?

This is it, Karen says

many songs later. Good, I say,

What do you mean, This is it.

This is where we get diesel.

Oh, oh, say, oh. Oh, good. I buy enough

to make safe passage at 3.89 a gallon.

I’ll sing Karen’s song for her,

The Dead elegy, Jimmy Row,

I’ll sing it over and over for her

until she gets real tired of me,

Jimmy Row, Jimmy Row,

I don’t know, row, Jimmy Row,

Jimmy row, and she calls for

the relief of natural wonders.

Jim Bodeen

21 April 2010

Canyonlands

STORYPATH/CUENTOCAMINO ON THIS DAY

Birsdsong, cattails, stars and a crescent moon. Nearly empty campground and a few tents. I don’t know the birds. Reports from the doctor and reports from my daughter. The further we get from home the closer we get. A poet writes me about God: Beautiful blood in a beautiful brain. I would add dark roast coffee beans in a ceramic mug. Light now, and a second cup. Sadie at my feet, humbled after breaking into her bottle of chewable glucosomine tablets yesterday when we left her in the mothership for 20 minutes crossing into Utah at Snowville. Karen calls the vet in Yakima and the receptionist laughs. Two weeks ago all that I could think about was skiing and now I’m traveling back to the beginning of the world. Lake Bonneville is all dried up now, but once its circumference was 20,000 miles, and fed by rivers that never reached the seas. Now it’s shrunken to the Great Salt Lake. How many tablets did she take? the receptionist asks. When did I bring her in? A week or so ago? Count backwards at three a day from then and it must be 100 or so. Give her a bottle of peroxide to drink and induce vomiting or let it run out her rear end in an hour or so. We give her lots of water and a bit of dry dog food and here it comes. Sister Sadie Sadie. I monitor the bowel movements of my wife and dog out of the corner of my eye. Who could I tell? Why God chose me to live this life, I do not know but I give thanks daily. A boy from North Dakota smoking Indian Tobacco in a souvenir pipe and walking railroad tracks taking medical reports from his grown children and sobbing. Will my dog find extreme suppleness for twenty minutes? We pass a Mexican restaurant called the Herradero. Here comes the sun. I hear George Harrison singing as I’m given the access code to the bicameral brain. Before falling asleep last night I read an early version of Martin Luther King’s sermon on the Good Samaritan. Obedience to the unenforceable. He uses this image twice. This is it, of course. Unsustainable obedience. Following the directions we’re given to the end, following past our ability to hear, to the without sound in absurd, I can’t hear it, but I follow, going that far, that is the work of the poet. Choosing a life with no guarantees is a life one doesn’t want to brag about too much in public, Be careful of that word called, it’s been commandeered by civilians, and those so honored are often given starched white collars that look, another poet has remarked, remarkably like nose rings in cattle. As Karen thought about what she read at the Lake Bonneville rest stop she carried it all the way down the mountain. She saw backwards in time. She looked into millions of years and saw the ancient shoreline of the Great Salt Lake. Needing land, now, high on the mountain, they’re building expensive row houses. You can see it from the freeway. Call it the highway. Listen to the singers crossing to the other side.

Jim Bodeen

20 April 2010

THE DAY KAREN BECAME A DEADHEAD

She found the original shoreline of the Great Salt Lake.

Then she turned off National Public Radio.

She said, That’s it, like she was sailing out from the Ballard Locks.

She was driving the mothership. When we stopped

for the night she had a dish of Karamel Sutra Ice Cream.

Jim Bodeen

19 April 2010

Utah Lake State Park

LEAVING AGAIN WITH KAREN AGAIN TRAVELING