In and Out of Notebooks

ALL MORNING

in and out of notebooks

the day unfolding in paper

leaves fallen ones bound

in and out in and out

with no purpose

and then with purpose equally

at odds a kind of windlessness

no purpose being

where words found

bring with them something

no news can carry

but what we come for

I know this has nothing

but everything but by God

it's hard it is and it isn't

courage it's outside

of the dreaming known

to go there

never mind to get there

Jim Bodeen

5 January 2017

I settle on a letter

a foundation

a kind of platform

the kind of thing

one does leaving

the office to those

left behind oh yes

a letter to a writer

of columns relatively

famous with a father

who asked for no quarter

other than learn a language

and a brother on a boat

this woman speaks to me

and I want to say thanks

with all that can be mustered

she lives in the city of politicians

and willfulness and this is all

what I give myself to

writing her trying for nothing

more giving it my all

I tell her what

I found there over time

Jim Bodeen

5 January 2017

READING W.S. MERWIN'S GARDEN TIME

WITH GRANDMA AND GRANDKIDS

ON THE WAY TO SCHOOL

Temperature in the car

reads -6 degrees outside

but it's tropical inside

surrounded by generations

ancestors we lost track of

addressing memory

music entering the right ear

where I'm placed in the trees

of being, the boy who is me

years and decades ago

walking the gravel road

just outside of city limits

in the North Dakota town

BB gun in hand

just past Shit Creek

and that yellow Meadowlark

on the fence post singing

This morning Karen driving

sun coming up on snow-covered

hills the purple sky behind us

me with the Merwin poems

in the passenger seat

accompanying all this

I read one line aloud

turning to the children

but happiness has a shape made of air

Karen saying, Explain that one,

wondrous invitation,

it was never owned by anyone

it comes when it will in its own time

Me trying to hang on to just this

for now it doesn't matter

without in fact getting it

or not surrounded as I am

Jim Bodeen

6 January 2017