How the trees came

SEQUOIADENDRON GIGANTEUM

Wild one

Between earth and sky

Evolutionary ancestor

Jim Bodeen

25 August 2014

MODELS IN LIFE AND POETRY

A friend’s message

leaves me not knowing

how to respond.

Out for a walk

Nobuyuki Yuasa’s

Bashō in my back pocket

I pull it out,

reading until I forget

about the whole thing.

Reading notes at the back end

Yuasa says count vowels

to count syllables—

Japanese breath counts

fall naturally

into breathing groups

five or seven syllables.

Jim Bodeen

22 August 2014

40 YEARS AGO THIS DAY

And yet we all in the end live, do we not, in a phantom dwelling?—but enough of that, I’m off to bed.

  —The Hut of the Phantom Dwelling, Bashō/ Burton Watson                    

My wife gave birth to twin daughters,

and I, helpless and overcome with joy,

passed out copies of a poem in the street,

distributing them too,

to doctors and nurses

in the hospital. The poem,

by Williams Carlos Williams,

is titled “The Gift” and it reads

as wondrous this day as it did

40 years ago. Among the lines,

“hard gold to love a mother’s milk” and,

“…all men by their nature give praise,

it is all that they can do.

Three years ago this day,

my wife and I moved into a new home

one level, smaller than the home

where we lived for 39 + years,

the only house our children knew

during childhood years.

We slept in the new house for the first time

on our daughters’ birthday.

On this day, this morning,

I sent that poem out again,

first to my wife and our daughters,

beginning my 70^th year.

·          

The house is in a development near the airport.

First homes for young people,

last homes for the elderly.

The house was non-descript,

without shade,

the one standing when the others sold,

but it had what he was looking for.

He liked the modest entry into the houses.

One turn off the four-line

shuttling people in and out of town.

A row of duplexes and rental houses

accessing the development.

He had long noted humble entrances

into the nation’s sacred places.

He saw outside sanctuaries

where others saw nothing.

The poor and rundown before national treasures.

He believed he could build a garden of trees.

He saw sanctuary at the end of the road.

A monastery that belonged to literature.

This is how the trees came to him.

Landscapers in developments

wanted three things:

put in underground sprinklers

and roll out grass over clay and rock.

Plant one non descript shrub

in the middle of every lawn.  

He had them transport his rocks

by tractor. They would take out the lawn

and put in a forest floor.

A mountain landscape

would emerge in miniature.

·          

He tried to tell the woman at the nursery

about groves of trees at the end of railroad tracks

in his childhood. It’s a small place

he told her. I may even have to plant

outside the fence to make a ring.

A grove of trees in the middle of nothing.

A hideout for a boy. A place for an old man.

I want you to help me plant a grove of trees.

How could he explain a North Dakota childhood

to a tree goddess in an upscale nursery?

He broke through her impatience

with a single utterance. Zen.

She led him to the beautiful trees.

He picked out four:

Yoshino Cherry, Canadian Chokecherry,

China Snow and Serviceberry.

These trees planted oval-oval shaped

would make North Park.

This is the beginning of how the trees

came to him, how they surrounded him

and took him in, the ancestors.

This is how the pine trees, beloved by Bashō,

entered his life. It was all gift,

as the physician poet had prophesied.

It is all that they can do.

Surrounded, neither priest

nor ordinary man, as Bashō wrote walking,

he would give praise from here.

Jim Bodeen

21 August 2014