HE LOOKS AT SHREDS OF HIS ANCESTRAL PAST

DREAMING ICE HOUSE SANCTUARY

Scouting snow solstice
Sun-tipped wild
Tucked into paradise

Jim Bodeen
20 December 2013

ON RECEIVING THIS DAY: SABBATH POEMS
BY WENDELL BERRY, FROM A FRIEND

       —for Lee Bassett

Sunday Morning. Karen leaves early
to ring bells for early service. Sister Sadie Sadie,
The old dog, arthritic, sleeps by the fire at my feet.
The old poet calls himself Lowdown,
In his opening prayer, This Day,

Being about time always coming up short
In time's own world. I begin here, before
Reading the last poem in the book,
Mad Farmer returning to close out the present,
Recalling an early image of Christ in a barn.

From here, he steps out,
And I turn again to his first Sabbath poems
From the mid-70s. The poet sits
Through fears and songs of critters
Among trees, until he hears

His own song. Here is where we met,
And when, my dear friend, decades past,
Setting out for silence, and failing.
The poet Wendell Berry
Gives up two words: Spirit and wild,

Carrying comfort and convention.
We're the ones out of control.
It is the Second Sunday in Advent.
The first reading from Isaiah:
Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist.

Jim Bodeen
December 10, 2013

HE TRANSLATED POEMS FROM EVERY SHRED

OF HIS ANCESTRAL PAST ON HIS WAY TO HAFEZ

When the movie and love-making are over

the night remains clear, and sky opens

for poems of Robert Bly. One has only

to find one word and childhood returns.

Cistern appears and I am six, descending

basement stairs of the Victorian House

owned by Great Northern Railway,

grasslands from Saskatchewan protecting

our family from wind. I’m sitting

on the second step in winter, basement

below me, wood steps winding the way

around a mysterious cache of water.

Sitting between worlds. Get to Hafez

in Shiraz by going through North Dakota.

By pass Minneapolis. Take the door

from the kitchen to the basement. Bly

unlocks his revolutionary past through Denmark.

He says the roof of the house will last the night,

and all poems end in gratitude. The hidden center

unexpressed by the poet himself holds the key.

Remove the links tying poems to occasion.

I could not have done this work on my own.

One can be reborn by reading the Gospel

in a second language. Counting the heavens

in Robert Bly’s poems leaves a man dizzy.

Jim Bodeen

8 November-18 December 2013