What the Cigar Makers Say

FOUR COUNT THURSDAY

Table club athletes

Waiting for Karen on stairs

Work we do in snow

Shoveling sidewalk

Sleeping homeless on mattress

Toes hike boots dry

What day is day

And where you do joy in walk

Why each precious step

Through snow walking

Footprints quieting bullshit

Nothing doing

Jim Bodeen

17 December 2015

TWO MEN

Living from sofa to sofa

the man didn’t know

he was without a home,

neither did the man

who owned the sofa.

Jim Bodeen

16 December 2015

TASKS BEFORE THE DAY

My friend outlines

the day’s chores,

adding, After 2

I’ll write some poems.

Jim Bodeen

15 December 2015

REMEMBERING HYMNS OF A NORTH DAKOTA CHILDHOOD

STAR OF WONDER, STAR OF LIGHT, WHILE AT MY GRAND DAUGHTER’S 

PIANO RECITAL 60-SOME YEARS LATER,

I LEAN TOWARDS MY WIFE WITH THE FOUND POEM

I’VE BEEN CARRYING ACROSS TIME WITH THIS CONFESSION

We three kings of orient are,

tried to smoke a rubber cigar,

it was loaded, it exploded,

following yonder star.

Jim Bodeen

14 December 2015

READING DECEMBER

“The heroic singer of tradition is blind. The NEW singer in this present must be sighted.”

            Allen Grossman How To Do Things With Tears

“…for he had re-cast within himself all that people understand by losing their bearings.”

            Harry Martinson, The Road

Highway 12, washed out, flooded,

keeps me from the mountains

and off skis, waxed with an old iron

and set behind this chair.

You can tell a teacher anything

and I’m writing my fourth grade teacher.

researching midges,

the small 2-winged fly

that swarms near water. They come up

in the Harry Martinson novel, The Road,

that came from interlibrary loan. Hand-made

crafted cigars have just been replaced

by those made by machine—women

make extra money with snuff recipes,

and cigarettes are on their way in.

This is a book about a tramp,

tramping, a vagabond Swede

telling about the America boat.

A million Swedes emigrating

between 1850 and 1913, those years

when prairie towns where I come from

got their start with the railroad.

In that neck of the plains, now,

frakking and diaspora—while in woods

out West everybody’s buying guns.

North Dakotans cradle guns

in pickups because badgers eat grain

bagged but not collected. My children

in marriage fight over owning assault weapons.

You know by now, midges bring

no cause for tears, or rage.

These automatic weapons aren’t on tv news.

Go into the gun shop and put down your money

no questions asked assault rifle placed in your hands

but you can’t walk out with the .45

until you show your concealed weapon permit.

Martinson’s tramp’s name is Bolle.

Cradling the inexpensive binding

with yellowed pages, he speaks across time,

Fear was the world’s greatest problem,

and the tramp’s greatest problem

was the fear of fear. My brother who grew up

in Alabama playing ball, returns in pilgrimage,

tells of two stops—the 16^th Avenue Baptist Church,

where Jesus Christ is the Main Attraction,

Birmingham, where the bomb exploded, Sunday,

September 15, 1963, at 10:22 a.m.

killing four young girls in Sunday School,

and the Muscle Shoals Sound Museum

on the Tennessee River, where Rick Hall

recorded Jimmy Hughes singing Steal Away

and Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman.

I was 18 years old when that Church was bombed.

This year, 2015, there’s been a mass murder

in these United States of America

every day of the year. Wilson Pickett

recorded the Beatles singing, Hey Jew,

and nobody noticed. Divine some of this

when you throw your I Ching coins.

That teacher in 4^th grade. Teacher turned

farmer’s wife—poet who knows small town

sadness and grief, I’ve read her poems,

lines for those who stayed, and the ones who left,

and I’m writing her letters, inspired

in part by that Swedish emigration,

the one going on now, in Syria,

Martinson says Sweden abandoned entire towns.

My teacher, she’s in her 80s now,

Her student, this old man writing,

is nine years old again, bawling

at the teacher’s desk fact-full, delirious

in front of classmates, un-ashamed.

Jim Bodeen

12 December 2015

THIS IS WHAT THE CIGAR MAKERS SAY

It is as though they have been consulting the I Ching.

Whose way is it? Yours? David Hinton’s?

Nothing doing that way. Uh uhh.

Waiting in the Kmart parking lot

for my daughter to drop off my grand daughter

sick with a cold, Grandpa day.

December sun comes up

through Union Gap,

while Leonard Cohen sings,

I’ll be yours for a song.

Jim Bodeen

11 December 2015