THREE LETTER POEMS AND A MOVIE ABOUT POETRY

LETTER TO BELDEN C. LANE, BACKPACKER WITH THE SAINTS,

AFTER COMING DOWN FROM THE ENCHANTMENTS

Wenatchee’s on fire, and those new homes tucked

against sage turned into flaming bombs and disappeared.

I’m just out of Eight Mile Lake in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness,

Northwest corner of the country, Washington State, Cascade Mountains,

off Icicle Creek Road, home to Yakima on 97 South.

Burned out trees standing, lining the trail

count as saints in my book, but what about those houses?

Your book is an outback trail away from all schools.

A place to further the unlearning.

A beginning space, always a place

to praise, practice breathing. A friend calls,

I’m in a hospital waiting for my brother’s surgery,

he’s seen your book in the library. It’s in my hand

before he wakes up. How things happen.

You’re one of my desert fathers during a month

of recovery as my brother teaches himself

to walk. My gift to him: old cane from Good Will.

“When you’re the only human present, you have

a particular responsibility to take pleasure in the place.”

This prayer from you, blessing and sentence,

serves me before each handful of nuts

on the trail. It’s all trail, we know, now,

but I’m talking four days of enchantments.

I titled a movie on YouTube from your words.

Father Climacus, 40 years under the boulder at Tholas.

Your real work, for me, the personal.

What you say about Mom & Dad. Carrying

the grief story the lifetime it takes

to lighten the pack. Unpacking each

theological construct every time you leave

the parking lot. I know the parking lots too.

For me the ladder of divine ascent

most always hears what comes from below.

But I love those angels moving both ways

on Jacob’s ladder. Not a clinker

in this book. Nothing to make the pack

too hard to carry, and you’re good as guide

on each hike, including your beloved Ozarks.

So many old friends in your book. All new

through your eyes. A divine milieu.

Teillard de Chardin evolved lonelier than ever.

“We live steeped in burning layers.”

Thanks for rescuing that. We hike for so many

of the same ways to be here.

Being the key. Lucky too, for being

able to lift the pack for what it holds.

Earth as an extension of the body of Christ.

Squirrels and field mice plant trees,

bodhisattvas we rally behind. Lectio terrestris.

In the new life we don’t have to be John Muir.

The ice bergs he walked, long gone.

Jim Bodeen

1 July 2015

LETTER TO FENTON JOHNSON

AFTER READING HIS PROSE BACKWARD

FROM HARPER’S TO GEOGRAPHY OF THE HEART

…try looking for lessons in solitude. Going It Alone: The Dignity

and Challenge of Solitude, Harper’s, April, 2015

…this being inside the other, the other inside me. Keeping Faith:

            A Skeptic’s Journey Among Christian and Buddhist Monks

Reading is the unsurpassed interactive act, and serious readers

among the least acknowledged and appreciated of revolutionaries.

            Geography of the Heart: A Memoir

I haven’t read the fiction. Dear Fenton,

The community that I belong to

builds itself on books, and just that fast,

you’re the mayor, come out of nowhere,

belonging to us all. As you quote

Brother Anthony, Your spiritual practice

is always for all beings, never for yourself.

Thank you, Fenton Johnson, for skepticism.

Thanks too, for writing about your Mom.

We share those mothers, yours

running monks home after hours,

mine choosing baseball over Christianity.

For your questions are a walk through anger.

For your final statements in Keeping Faith:

When I understand that all is holy,

then I will be a monk; and, Each time

any one of us forgoes immediate gratification

for some higher aspiration, we are living…

as a kind of monk. There, I just broke

a pact with myself not to let this letter

become a list of your quotations—

A kind of fancy grocery list

in a William Carlos Williams poem.

I fail again. I’m humbled by your work.

Your list of ideal solitaries

is a study in geography and time.

You grew up in a medieval landscape.

I grew up in rural North Dakota.

A poet friend sends me a poem

inspired by Giorgio Morandi.

A theologian backpacker, Belden Lane,

goes nowhere without the desert Fathers,

both of you writing about Merton.

I found Merton in the fall of 1968

coming back from Vietnam,

that week he ran into bad wiring—

he’s been with me nearly 50 years.

Here you are at Tassajara, in a yurt

with language of suchness.

Every moment a burgeoning forth

is how David Hinton translates

Chinese poets, and suchness

comes up in your book.

You, Fenton Johnson,

sitting mayor on a cushion,

practitioner of great longing,

arrive at my doorstep in a magazine,

itself an act of great imagination,

I thank you for going it alone.

You, Lane, Hinton,

all go into the mothership

carrying me to the summer trailhead.

This is for Larry, also,

the beloved. Thank you for your love.

Karen and I have been together                                                                      

since the year Merton came into my life.

Your mother drives Brother Louis back

to the monastery in the battered red Ford.

Great achievements shaped by anonymous

hands working over time. It all connects.

Jim Bodeen

April-2 July, 2015 

A LITTLE MOVIE ABOUT POETRY:
UNFOLDING A POEM BY DAVID HINTON ON THE LAWN





READING JON SOBRINO’S LETTERS TO ELLACURÍA

IN YAKIMA WHILE BACHELOR BUTTONS BLOOM SIX MONTHS AFTER RETURNING FROM A MONTH WITH THE MARTYRS OF EL SALVADOR

Because the roses have been fed with compost tea

made from kitchen waste, the surface root system

of Bachelor Buttons has reached into rose beds

creating a field of wild flowers becoming

a desert landscape. The non-gardener decision

to let Bachelor Buttons go and grow, thriving, even if they eclipsed

the beauty of the rose, made by flowers themselves.

Todos los mártires y todas las victimas viven hoy

y nos llaman a la liberación. The martyrs live!

They want us alive, too. The fact of a meal

in one banquet hall. Ellacu—

no intimacy could be greater—

the sound of Sobrino’s voice comes off the page

as the ears of Ellacuría perk up,

and one can see his head turn, the President

of the university, listening to his friend.

But inside the wonder of intimacy and truth of letters,

it is not Jon Sobrino who speaks, but his friend:

Estados Unidos está mucho peor que América Latina.

Porque Estados Unidos tiene una solución,

pero es mala solución…en América Latina

no hay soluciones. Better to have no solutions

than bad ones. Some call El Salvador the Holy Land.

Pilgrims read Sobrino’s letters to Ellacuría

in the rose garden at the university

where students keep stories alive and opening eyes

for visitors—those who would see.

Dios de los pobres, el de Jesús.

Promises get made in the garden

that can’t be kept in the Empire.

No vuelvas, the bishop says in Dosteovsky.

No vuelvas, Sobrino reminds himself,

talking to his friend crucified with the poor,

Ellacuría, still calling for the crucified

to be taken down from the cross. Dosteovsky’s

Bishop tells Jesus his return is unnecessary,

We’ve got it all worked out here don’t come back.

Dressed in the sacred one cannot feel

the uranium and oil that made the tight fabric. 

Sobrino gives the world fifteen letters,

but only fifteen. Readers in the rose garden

are left to write their own letters to see what happens.

One walks into a garden enticed by beauty.

Bees find a way to the Bachelor Buttons

themselves in a diaspora they can’t see taking place,

dependent on those who put them at risk.

Nothing is finished by readers carrying

Sobrino’s letters into any garden. Shade grown

coffee from the mountains of El Salvador

intoxicates while serving as medicine.

Liberty connects to joy and joy is a gift from God.

Libertad es vencer las ataduras de la historia,

el miedo, el egoísmo. Tied to the story

of the past, the pilgrim sits with coffee

surrounded by wild flowers buzzing.

Jim Bodeen

9 June 2010