Driving Highway 101

NYE BEACH WALK WITH KAREN 

BREAKFAST HAIKU

        "Quilters never stop"

        --Karen Bodeen

Mapled blueberries

Corn Flakes invite the bell to sound

Bring yesterday home

OK last night tired

Karen setting out

Breathing so much joy

None of this planned

Holding these stones in my hands

come up from below

Every day's first poem

Workshop in wonder, O God

Warming for the now

The work before me

What I asked God for

Sitting with Poems

Jim Bodeen

15 Sept 2016

Camp Redwood

NYE BEACH WALK WITH KAREN

Karen in paisley dress, in sunshine

and wind, feet in sand, barefoot.

We were here 16 years ago this January

reading poems with Nye Beach writers.

"The Elizabeth Inn," Karen says,

"We could hear the surf from our room."

I remember, the morning of that reading,

it was dark. The inauguration

of George W. Bush. All those men

in long, black coats. Carrying those

images into the reading of poems,

it's one of my seminal images.

The morning after the reading

we walked the beach, and found

those large black stones, surf

swirling around them

as we searched for spots to stand on.

We took photographs of each other

looking out to sea, later framing them

in the collage frame from my sister.

We walk back again today,

retracing our story, stopping

at the Nye Beach Viet Nam Veteran's Memorial.

We read the poem, see ourselves

mirrored in the black stone

as we did then, as we saw ourselves

in the stone in Washington. It's so beautiful

what they did, mirroring.

I fix tacos in the mothership

surrounded and cutting limes

without knowing where I am.

Karen says, "I'm going to ask a favor,"

startling me, "What?"

"Wipe the mice poop from the toilet paper door."

Jim Bodeen

14 September 2016

THE GREAT TSUNAMI OF 1700

Karen steps out of truck

takes photos of elderly couple

reading Tsunami sign

at Lincoln City. A 9+ quake

off shore fault system--

Cascadia Subductdion Zone

from Northern California to British Columbia.

A wave of 50 feet.

I'm thinking about Native villages

wiped out as Karen gets back

in the cab. "I took a picture of you

photographing that elderly couple,"

I say to her. "Yes, that elderly couple,

they're our age, or younger."

Jim Bodeen
13 September 2016