SUNDAY MORNINGS WITH MAMA
So many places to find you Mom.
So many ways to hear your story.
You are life unfolding.
With God in your knuckles
so much of what I didn't know
comes to me through your fingers.
When we quit with language
I thought it was all over
between us. You were so right,
that day on the way to the Yankees game,
mad at me, giving me all I needed to know,
You don't have to go to El Salvador to find God.
Jim Bodeen
22 January 2011
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DATE IN LATE AFTERNOON
Karen shows me where to look
●
SKIING AGAIN WITH KAREN
Words get out of the way
Jim Bodeen
20 January 2011
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Water into ice
into water melting ice
on a body of water
●
THE WONDER OF OWNERSHIP
My neighbor's house--now?
My neighbor's house?
Women who built this house,
my friends and neighbors--gone.
Nobody owns this house now--now
someone's making money from padlocked doors.
Telephone number on front door
says who to call, and I've called.
The hand behind the gold paint
claims a kind of ownership, too,
would you say? Grafitti
owns the night. Ownership in the age
of the great foreclosure on America.
The house is for sale, that much
you will be told, if you ask,
when you call. You won't be told
who owns it, or who you're buying from.
Jim Bodeen
21 January 2011
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HOPE FROM HIGH CAMP--BEAUTY FIRST
Crystal ships on an avalanche slope
God in my mother's knuckles
O God in Mom's knuckles
Extending reality's bones
I walk this hand with my fingers
Thin skins over loose snow
Grateful inside unseen border worlds
given me from ceremonies
handed on in waves by common barbers
From fear that brings full potential
Faceting crystals refusing
Earth's invitation to bond
Jim Bodeen
19-20 January 2011
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We pray, too, for the Hippopotamus, shrink-wrapped in plastic.
●
BRING OUT THE CONGA DRUMS, BROTHER
I THINK WE SHOULD JUST PRAY ON
Why we're all pissed off
Talking with tattooed young men
Have the other's back
●
Walking my alley
March on, just a little while
Pick up the dog shit
Jim Bodeen
MLK Sunday, 2011
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SUNDAY MORNING
Belonging to the work, Wild Path,
Fingering the arthritic knuckle of my mother.
Jim Bodeen
15-18 January 2011
LITERATURE THAT MEANS BUSINESS
IS THE BUSINESS OF NO THING
This is theology of song.
Jim Bodeen
15-18 January 2011
Posts
words get out of the way. i do like this. as i type i could not remember if there was a comma after words, but in some ways i think my slant says what i find, the need to force them out, while the beauty of this is they disappear without a struggle. much more spiritual this way. maybe it's your contemplative patience and my lack of it. kjm
ReplyDeleteshrink wrap is like deep frying, what it makes of things.
What you do with punctuation here guarantees alternative readings--including ones you hear that may be unknown. It's as good as your own comment/poem on the goats on highway in December. The asphault mirroring the unseen world of your vision. Nine bows, Kevin.
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