Welcome Bench at Dodge

MID-WEEK, AUGUST

Sadie wags her tail

hearing Teresa’s coming.

Belly rub and treats.

Maybe she doesn’t think

about her toenails

getting clipped.

Our vet for 20 years

thinks the tumor unsightly

but benign, wants

Sadie on steroids

through allergy season.

Weight’s good. Then

bath on front lawn

with three kinds

of cortisone shampoos.

I break some duck jerky.

It’s watermelon time.

One for Sadie, one for me.

Jim Bodeen

20 August 2014

FOR HIS SON ON THE MOUNTAIN

He leaves a hand-written poem

pinned to bathroom mirror

with toothpaste

Jim Bodeen

17 August 2014

NOT MUCH MORE TO SAY

…being neither priest nor ordinary man.

     “A Visit to the Kashima Shrine,” Bashō

Tactical  breath walk

Land on the odd syllable

Pine tree, rock, akadama

Jim Bodeen

16 August 2014

THE DEVESTITURE OF BASHŌ

In his first walk

he saw his dilemma,

meeting local and priest.

He was neither.

Neither was he Samurai.

Collecting nothing,

later he would have it all.

Now he would be neither,

nothing. For poetry

he would do this.

Jim Bodeen

15 August 2014

UNDER THE PORCH LIGHT

Hand rubbing stones from Spokane River,

working on the stone’s patina on front porch at dusk.

All day walking garden after early morning

coffee, talking poems. Mid-August

and crickets. All of Bashō’s

cicadas join in the singing.

Jim Bodeen

15 August 2014

BASHŌ DESCRIBES HIS CLOTHES,

BEING NEITHER PRIEST NOR ORDINARY MAN,

FROM THIS DAY FORTH: WANDERER

Setting out on the first leg,

Record of a Well-Exposed Skeleton,

wind blowing through his heart,

determined to fall,

to become the title of his story,

Bashō describes his dress—

in prose, and early: No metal

on his belt, sack on shoulder,

clean shaven, string of beads—

like priest, but not one,

covered in worldly dust. Prevented

from entering inner temple. Bashō

descends to the stream. Knowing,

and remembering, the poet Saigō

writing for the woman

washing potatoes. Bashō

finds the way. Walking

to Kashina Shrine, his second

leg, two years later, confronted

again, he makes judgment: priest

clad black as crow, bundled

in multiple stoles, portable shrine

on his back, as if he had free pass

to world beyond the gateless gate.

Dizzied by the priest,

dressed also in black robe, Bashō,

neither priest nor ordinary man.

What is he? Who am I—wavering

between bird and mouse? He opens

Records of a Well-Worn Satchel,

with well-worn drapery wind-swept

and swept away, Fall necessary

to be one with nature, first lesson,

third journey. And one more:

Divestiture of security, serving

neither court nor scholarship

with its encumbering ignorance.

Preparing self for the task,

for the Deep Road to the Far North.

Deepest devotion from how one walks.

Jim Bodeen

15 August 2014

MEASURING THE DISTANCE

The Mothership is in the shop

and needs more than an oil change:

it needs brakes. I sit outside

on the smoker’s bench

that says, Welcome, not smoking,

reading Sam Hamill’s Habitation,

so new it’s still stiff from the printer’s,

not yet in a single bookstore.

What I’ve learned from these poems,

40 years in their making,

is how to carry a vision

and make a life from walking. Front wheels

on the truck aren’t wheeling,

front brake calipers seizing

and old rotors cracked. What this means

is money if we’re going to run

northern California rivers this September.

Looking for miniature landscape stones

is a suiseki journey. Making literature,

Hamill’s first word, standing

in a crowd of disbelievers, a call

from God through the exile’s mouth.

Those old Chandler-Price presses

mixing smells of ink and oil, bolted

into floors of the old fort

had my attention. All of it

a flood on the Welcome bench,

Requiem, Hamill’s homage to Rexroth,

Rilke echoing in Hamill’s ear

as he writes. And after love, after the cry of love,

is stoppered in the throat…It’s Hamill’s

Bashō though, stirring my heart,

these words on the Journey to the Interior:

Into the geography of soul

that makes the journey itself a home.

The morning passes into high summer heat

on the bench with Habitation and a notebook.

I studied the man, how he wrote, what he read,

for 20 years, a distant apprenticeship.

How I go to work each day is the same.

How I work with the poem is how I work

with little trees. Bonsai and poem

mirrors the already and the not yet.

What to leave in, what to take out, the same ache.

And in the river, Yes, again. Magic Mind

healing the rock as it surfaces in my hand.

I carry home what sensei leaves behind.

The signature of my work like this, raw,

in the notebook resting on table in Mothership.

Storypath/Cuentocamino—a dozen years

following a bilingual word half made-up,

charged and given to me, as long

as I had discipline and courage to obey.

A life-time with three charged words:

Luchador, Abrecaminos, Storypath/Cuentocamino,

nearly half a century listening to others.

Five years with the mothership.

Crazy Cloud and Mother Quilt rolling together.

Notebook, cameras, IPhone and sewing machine.

All given for what gives itself up in word.

Nearly anonymous. Anonymity

for the poem and for what calls itself God,

bound to call and calling, free and not-free.

Jim Bodeen

15-17 August 2014