UP AND DOWN QUATRAINS FOR A NEW SEASON

ALL DAY CHACO STICK

--for Ken Capp

Look at the staff, wound
with tight-woven white rope

for hands. New rope,
no sweat from walking

an ancient path. The staff,
shaved and smoothed

for pilgrimage
beginning day after Easter,

complete in itself,
innocent and pure.

Desire of any journey,
worthy of patched robe

worn by St. Francis.
Rope binds the pilgrim

to his path, too, not
any map, as my friend says,

practical as his mention
of truck stop with hot showers.

Jim Bodeen
February 26, 2008--April 2, 2011


UP AND DOWN QUATRAINS FOR A NEW SEASON

--for Kevin

Never predictable, spring.
Not ready for mountains
without snow, I pick up
The Collected Poems of Allen Ginsberg,

and the first poem makes me weak
in the knees with its language.
Wordsworth and Coleridge walk the alps
looking for peak experience, lost,

finally asking a local for the summit
they've already walked by. The Gobi Room
is a desert of light and sound. Mother
recognizes my voice but doesn't know my face.

Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness.
I spend 58 on skis, but who's counting. Warm
in the mothership with Karen
and a lift ticket that never expires,

throw me from Heaven. No.
Christ, I'm not ready. Throw me
one of the Upanishads--the one looking
for the spirit behind eye and ear.

There was nothing false about mountain light
and it was dark before dinner time.
Sit with me. Sit here in the heart space.
Must one mention baseball?

My friend sends a note saying,
Throw out the first pitch, Buddy.
His baseball poem is the Poem of the Month
in Spitball, and he writes about the game

in the closing penitentiary. He killed seven
guys, watch your back/ at the plate.
My mother wore me out with baseball
when she took out a home loan

to buy season tickets. What do you think?
Do you think a man must come down
from the mountain? Penitentiaries
set the mind on April's scripture.

Jim Bodeen
1 April 2011