MARTY LOVINS, AT 75, TIPS INTO THE ANTHROPOCENE EPOCH
AT THE END OF THE CENOZOIC ERA
It turns out we’ve been living in the now
for the past 10,000 years, give or take.
But we’ve made our mark as a species.
Our libraries and all will leave prints
in a layer of the earth’s surface
about as thick as the tissue paper
stretched over balsa wood
in one of your shields protecting us
each morning
from massive amounts
of carefully laid down bullshit.
Jim Bodeen
15 May 2014
A SOLDIER’S COMPLIMENT
He would embrace the contrary impulse…
…repeatedly sabotaging expectations.
—C.D. Wright,
Introduction to Spring and All
Following the poem
danger de-fused
at cost
friends experience
AS
the local sidewalk
cracked cement
mother’s broken back
The poet and the radioactive price
Any given subway
Jim Bodeen
14 May 2014
SPRING AND ALL
This conversation
with neighbor
about fence and trees
separating us
Going to talk to him soon
Jim Bodeen
13 May 2014
THE SCIENCE OF THE IMAGINATION
Imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it
description nor an evocation of objects or situations, it is to say that poetry
does not tamper with the world but moves it…It affirms reality…since reality
needs no personal support but exists free from human action…
—William Carlos Williams, Spring
and All
I have been having this conversation with my neighbor about
the fence and trees that separate us.
·
The little book
with the blue cover
by the doctor
from New Jersey.
It’s spring now.
All here in storied
fragments
Barry orders a copy
The original
and sets out to organize
the doctor-poet’s
first-thought-best-thought word
Patterson everywhere
Even Yakima
Beautiful thing!
And the early life.
The apprenticeship
with the poem
step by step
out of Churchill’s Book Store.
New Directions.
New directions
lifting me every time
I say it
a kind of levitation
A full gospel
Crossing the street,
just crossing the street!
The jewelry store’s
a school full of street kids
Beautiful thing!
M. stealing my camera
young heart buying it back
on the black market
She denying it all
beginning to end
Taking pictures of each other
Does she laugh about it today
Is she alive
Raising heart and mind to God
adding, in the poem,
not part of the Baltimore Catechism
Joseph of Cupertino levitating
every time he says God’s name
Franciscan friar and New Jersey doc
the doctor scrambling
his composition
crossing oceans
Two mothers
dead and dying
reborn in mutual devotion
Reborn in the poem
Daily practice over time
Jim Bodeen
12 May 2014
THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE
…words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their
flight.
—William
Carlos Williams, Spring and All
He turns to the trees.
Watching them breathing, in and out.
Poison on the inhale.
Oxygen on the exhale.
Watching them,
he asks himself,
How do they do it?
Jim Bodeen
11 May 2014
A WORD FOR MY SISTER ON HER BIRTHDAY
Populacho.
Word I bring home,
wrap up, a present.
Drinking coffee,
the Mexican and I.
Traffic? No, we walk.
More talk,
then the word.
Populacho
From the pueblo.
Workers.
Populachero.
Despectivo. Scornful.
Anything vulgar.
Too common for dictionary.
My sister at 60.
For the pueblo, from the pueblo.
Opposing word we belong to.
Word for my sister’s birthday.
Mil gracias.
From the bottom of my heart.
A word you can’t buy.
What I say, hard-earned.
Legacy-crossing grace word .
Love,
Jim
9 May 2014
IX.
But you
are rich
in savagery
—William Carlos Williams
Black-eyed Susan in a poem
Poetry describing
Exchange of water and air
Jim Bodeen
9 May 2014
NO.
After three years
in the suburbs of West Valley
I don’t pretend to be a coyote.
No. I’m not coyote.
I am, in fact, Neanderthal.
Coyote is what comes up in dream.
Jim Bodeen
8 May 2014
ON A BENCH AT THE ATHLETIC CLUB, READING THE 1922 POEM
…in recording the force moving…in the largeness of its
proportions…
…is the presence of a…
…is not a plaything but a power…
This separates
…is not a…about…I have experienced that to my sorrow
The discipline involved
in order to get to the new improv
the one left
(If I'm ready)
duende on the move, has moved, moved again
Waiting…
nothing more
Jim Bodeen
7 May 2014
EGGSHELL BLESSINGS
Good inning from the home team
Hot spots sprayed cool on old dog
Worms mating under cover
Jim Bodeen
5 May 2014
SATURDAY
Some of them were dreamers.
Some of them were fools.
And for some of them
it was only
Some of them were fools.
And for some of them
it was only
the moment that mattered.
—Jackson Browne
…that in addition to the five major mass extinctions,
there had been many lesser extinction events…a pattern emerged…mass extinctions
seemed to take place at regular intervals of roughly 26 million years…extinction,
in other words, occurred in periodic bursts, like cicadas crawling out of the
earth.
—Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth
Extinction
No special effort was necessary to cleave where the
cleavage already existed.
—William Carlos Williams, Spring
and All
He built himself a garden of trees.
It took him 1000 days.
He watched his grandchildren play soccer on Saturday.
Jim Bodeen
4 May 2014
Q&A DURING BONSAI REPOTTING DEMONSTRATION
No, I didn’t go to Japan to learn this.
GIs brought these skills home from WWII.
This tool?
Hoof pick for a horse hoof.
Jim Bodeen
2 May 2014
RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE STREET
A Spanish word for ropes.
HEY JIMBO
Watdayacall
a nose with no body?
Dunno
Nobody knows!
Nobodaddy! No!
To escape the dullness,
Beautiful thing!
All that dulls
in order to greet you,
the great separation necessary
On the way to the city
No free way the interstate
clumped restaurants
Mexican, Los Cabos
But what does it mean?
A vacation place, a peninsula
No, no, no, that’s like calling it
a Mexican Restaurant!
The capes,
Ah,...su gran satisfacción era oir los aplausos
al fin del día
Everyone looking inside telephones
at dictionaries now translating
All inclusive, 50% off honeymoons
No, no, Not two seas, one paradise
Aha! A cabó
All this naysaying
to find the verb, acabar,
to end it all, to find the end,
last restaurant off the highway
rope it up
last words of Christ.
Jim Bodeen
1 May 2014
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