ON REFUSING ALL OF THE SMOOTH STONES
IN THE RIVER’S TUMBLING JUST OUT OF TOWN
Maybe what remains is the elegy.
This odd turn towards the camera
with moving parts.
Seeing the beloved like this
in her one moment.
On the Washington side of the Columbia River
through Stevenson.
Explain that one to Meriweather Lewis.
A day drive.
Over Blewett Pass, Karen asks me
if I want to stop at St. John the Forerunner Monastery
and buy some cheese cake from the nuns.
Like Bly says in his Big Book,
Even your parents can’t believe how much you’ve changed.
When he began lifting fist-sized stones
from rivers, he couldn’t recall, exactly.
It was Sunday. He’d brought grandchildren,
and the first stone came from the glacier’s snout,
shattered glass. He collapsed the riverbed
in his garden, tracking an ancestral story.
Jim Bodeen
26 November 2013
LINES FOR A SOLITARY POET
—for B
Looking for a way through a
lifetime
of the poet’s translated
poems,
underlining, lines as cairns
in landscapes of the other,
otherness part of what’s
here,
part of what’s lonesome and
untold,
part of it, too, lines
accumulate
until land and sky come
clear.
This is a solitary poet.
He lays down his pen, and as
the poem
emerges, the poet himself
gets smaller.
It’s not Robert Bly who makes
a poet great.
Neither is it the Nobel
Prize.
These lines are morning bird
songs
from Tomas Tranströmer, his
own work
pushing him from the nest.
Discipline of practice, way
of solitaries
on birthdays bowing to daily
lines.
Stark contrast from the
awards dinner,
escapes through bathroom
windows.
Jim Bodeen
8 November 2013
MOVEMENT IN THE MOTHERSHIP
In the womb of the Goddess
Breathing is another word for praise
Jim Bodeen
19 November 2013
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