Almost, Through This Long Night

UNDER STORY, OVER STORY

We have reached the point

where we can’t get through the night

without more news of fires.

This is what we say to each other

turning out the light, Our goodnight kiss

whispering, Chelan.

Chelan is on fire.

Jim Bodeen

18 August 2015

FALL FEEL TO THINGS WITH FIRES

         —for Wes Hanson

Cool, clear morning, old song.

Stayed low in summer bag

beneath sunshine and sage.

Fall feel to things, finally,

circling. Sage, rock,

and bird song. Suiseki stones

under kitchen table,

the mothership a zendo

dreaming. Spokane River,

low and warm giving up

deep histories in river rock.

Walking off the grid

changes the eye, charging the eye,

bringing you closer

to William Blake.

Have you been with God

this morning, Grandfather?

A dozen small birds fly

into a small shrub

just beyond sage.

Sun higher on my cheek

since birds landed

entering water home.

Water too low, too warm

for fish. Some of what this day

has already given me

is failure to respond to beauty.

Walking with a man

carrying a sling

full of hand-made wooden flutes

on a quarter section of land

dedicated by law

to trust and preservation,

bone dry open to any passing match,

I’m accompanied by the listening power

of a camera with better ears

than mine, and an eye

beyond man’s capacity to comprehend,

a falcon’s eye in yarak.

Living like that for a morning,

trying and failing.

I walk with a man

who paints, whose water colors

activate the imagination,

who writes poems daily

wrapping himself

in a piece of hard scrabble land,

land that opens at Sliding Gate Road,

the mind itself born of a Williams poem.

The river I walked into

could not care less for the action above it

on a freeway of cement,

fueling commerce and apocalypse,

the fires themselves at this moment

jumping the great Columbia River.

This river, these pot holes,

my feet in this warm water

at its dangerously low level

granting me access to stones

not seen in anyone’s lifetime.

These stones with stories

of where they’ve been.

We guess what’s happened

and we’re not wrong.

They will appear again

in countless poems, in gardens.

I walk on them in sandals

balancing, off balance too,

turning them with my hands,

carrying the odd one

with me to the mothership

in cloud sky worship.

Already they have a place

in the great telling of morning.

Jim Bodeen

7 August—18 August 2015