USHERING THE OTHER INTO STUDIO SPACE

USHERING THE OTHER INTO STUDIO SPACE

Hyper ethereal lives under the open sky
into exile through windblown mountain passes
Shih-shu, rock and bark poetry,
idle drowning, poems with a breath of pine wood.
If it all seems ordinary to you, well, it should.

The push-knock school of revision.
Chia Tao, a wandering Immortal.
Typing the titles of Gary Snyder's poems,
fingers slip to the wrong keys
and I've arrived at a new Bodhi ritual.

Hyper ethereal lives under an open sky.
Windblown mountain passes present themselves
as gateways to stories. Images
of Lord Krishna and Jesus accompany
childhood narratives. Everything feels like

call and re-call in ceremonial time,
ancestral. Becoming aware of the self as a walker,
constantly walking was the revelation of knowing
the stranger in the living room. Was he, then,
a stranger to himself? Perhaps

that's the wrong question. Allowing
the other into studio space being the real work,
the man is all right with his routines. He
knows he'll soon be found out in small talk,
that yucca gate with no fence blow down.

Jim Bodeen
1 December 2015