SONNETS OF BURGEONING CHANGE


TRAIL TALK

Failure with conversation
Fresh  after festival days
Shut up now in the notebook

Jim Bodeen
29 November 2015


TACOS AT WOLF POINT PARK

















LINES AND DRAWINGS FROM THE KITCHEN TABLE

Drop me a post card, sometime,
Donald says, as we say our goodbyes
After tacos in the park, after Uncle’s prayers.
Feel their hearts, Uncle says,

Donald translating. The language lesson
Deepening, hearing the L, hearing the D,
In Sioux dialect. Drop me a post card,
Sometime. The Highline is a rail

Road between Dakota and Yakama.
The quilt is from women off the Avenue
And my granddaughter looks at our film
Wanting to know which one is Uncle,

Which one is Red Boy, because she wants
To have names right on her drawing.
We’re pilgrims stopped at a picnic table
After Wolf Point saying thanks.

Jim Bodeen
25 November 2015



THE SONNETS OF BURGEONING CHANGE

21 November 2015

The garden put down (finally) for winter.
Bonsai trees protected in layers of bark and leaf.
Twice in one day for coffee with friends.
What happened to the day?
My older friend tells me of an 8-day journey
He took when he was 21 and in the Army in Okinawa.
With another GI. It was 1960 or 61, and the two of them
Ended up in Kyoto. They went out looking for girls
And ended up in Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital,
Another world, and he was never the same.
The friend is my jeweler, a shield maker.
He walked through temples and pine trees
And his eyes never returned to the barracks.
He pins an elk’s tooth in a copper thimble to my vest.

Jim Bodeen
21 November—25 November 2015

23 November 2015

Karen stands in her coat and scarf
By the chair in the medical office
Waiting for her appointment
On the morning of our 47th wedding anniversary.
The sun is a silver disc in the eastern sky
And she mistakes it for the moon.
Ours is routine medicine I begin to write
As the nurse calls her name in mid-sentence.
Before sunrise Gary Snyder read
From a recording of  Dangerous Peaks
In the living room, bringing his voice,
Each practiced syllable, up the 5, for us all.


PRACTICE WITH THE POEM

Say the word out loud, even while silent,
Reading to oneself. Hear it in the ear
As it was written down in the speaker’s voice.
Even one’s own words, on paper, a kind
Of betrayal. Circumambulation of the body
Stretching, after bouncing on the ball.
All limbs holding, going up to, beyond,
Seven steps along the way, breathe and relax.
Muscles working in a circular pattern, moving
In and out of three places where a poem
Is held to the eyes. Ocular entrance
And new-found territory in cellular life.
Present to the re-sounding word.
Each beat, pulsing, re-pulsing against silence.

Jim Bodeen
This Week in November




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