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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