THREE MEDITATIONS WHILE DRIVING
AFTER READING ED HARKNESS’ POEM,
UNION CREEK IN WINTER,
LETTER TO AMERICA
I remember my old teacher
talking about In Memoriam
saying, There’s a poem
we could talk about
after we’ve lived with it
for twenty years. Then,
I think, that’s a long time
to live with a poem, even a poem
with these lines:
Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee...
Forty years later, it doesn’t seem
so long at all. Now there’s
an urgency to sit with poems,
in accompaniment
through the morning
knowing they’ll bring
some of that time into the river.
I begin emerging from the dream
early, thinking about Ed’s poem
and Union Creek, before it runs
into the American River—that
elegant first stanza, and the colossal
finalé, staying inside the poem’s banks,
until my awareness of reading
right through those middle stanzas
embarrasses me. I’ll return there
before sunrise I say to myself,
and I do and they are beautiful.
How long can one stay in a poem
on Facebook? This leads me to Kora players
in Ed’s poem, between Dylan and Hummingbirds,
and now I’m with Williams and Kora in Hell,
but not now, and backing out,
I look for Toumani. He would be
the kora player in Ed’s poem,
in accompaniment
through the morning,
Our wills are ours, we know not how...
knowing they’ll bring
some of that time into the running river.
Emerging from the dream
early, thinking about Ed’s poem
and Union Creek, before it runs
into the American River.
How would Bonny proceed in Germany
with her cello? Phoebe in Seattle praying
for the elephants? Or Irene, up the street,
what does she hear? Karen dreaming,
and Jane on Sunflower Hill? Who
would travel to Toumani in West Africa
to read him Ed’s poem beginning
in Union Creek before it enters the American River?
Toumani would be the Kora player in Ed's poem.
Kora, the mandinka harp built from a calabash
cut in half and covered with cow skin
to make a resonator with a hardwood neck.
Traditionally from griot families, historians
and storytellers. Jali, bard, oral historian.
SidikiDiabaté was the father of Toumani Diabaté.
New ancient strings, a tribute to fathers.
How would Lacy Dreamwalker hear the water strings
after making the swift journey to the Pacific?
We don’t stay with poems very long anywhere.
Their loyalty to us left out of our conscious lives,
this, the grace of the sustaining poem
on its way to the ocean. the way
of Ed's poem in that water-running
way to everything we would love and keep
if we could, its rivers, its ice, its bitterroot, its winter
wrens,
...
its green and orange lichens, its Dylan,
its kora players, its humming birds, you,
me, and our Muslim neighbor, Maya, alive.
Who would travel to Toumani in West Africa
to read him Ed’s poem beginning
in Union Creek before it enters the American River?
How would Lacy Dreamwalker hear the water strings
after making the swift journey to the Pacific?
We don’t stay with poems very long anywhere.
Their loyalty to us left out of our conscious lives,
this, the grace of the sustaining poem
on its way to the ocean.
Jim Bodeen
24 January 2017--7 February 2017
DEAR LORD, IF YOU CAN'T MAKE ME FUNNY,
HELP ME LAUGH
I wish I was funnier. I do. News blackout here today too. Waiting on a phone
call from Mary at Lutheran world mission on accompaniment program for immigrant
children. Mary's an attorney who adopted an el Salvadoran child some fifteen
years ago. She took me to the living Jesuit liberation theologians and to the
poorest of the surviving FMLN refugees. She took me to the repopulated
communities. She was in El Salvador practicing law during peace accords. I was
sitting close to Fr, Jon Sobrino when he said, Take the people down from the
cross. Take the crucified people down from the cross.
I was naked in the sauna yesterday when
the naked white men entered intoxicated by the times. I failed at politeness
and defaulted to an automatic "fuck you" as I left. I had just read
page 20 of Thich Nhat Hahn's your true
home. This: it is not only your love that is organic; your hate is too.
Then I re-entered the locker room, and sat naked on my stool. Who comes around
the corner but my naked Jungian dream therapist, who I returned to after returning
from El Salvador a few years back. We talked about the sauna I had just left,
and I showed him Karen's quilt work on Terry's poems. Jane's snow covered birds
on muslin. Pictures on telephones. He said he will be at the Saturday march. I
still wish I was funnier. I think the funny poem, if it can be found, is closer
to hate than love. What thinkest thou? Be there truly, the monk says on the
back cover of his book. I am so grateful for my ability to curse the
motherfuckers in total joy in the credible voice of a poor NoDak--of a Vietnam
vet, and my mother's son, my mother who said to me, and still visits, saying
still, Jimmy, you've gone too far this time, and remembering all this, I gave a
rant at Starbucks in Safeway in Spanish yesterday buying Casi Cielo, about the
Trumperos, sending the chicana baristas into laughter because they kept
slipping back into English. Casi Cielo, Los perdido Trumperos! Alas, I was not
arrested, and at 71 have still never been to jail. Thank G-d for continued
opportunities. How did all of these Bobby Marley songs get in my head? I only
wanted my grandkids to hear him sing, One Love. Rasta Man, get up, get up, get
up, now. Be well sister. Help relieve me of all my seriousness.
Thinkest. Thinkest, g-d dammit. Don't
correct me. What thinkest thou? I'm a naked man walking down the middle of a
snow-filled street, howling Tom McGrath's poem, Start the Poetry Now, weeping
William Blake tears, Sweep, sweep, sweep. I used to tell my children, If you're
going to be funny, make me laugh.
Thank you, Lord, Marley sings, for what
you've done for me. Thank you, so much, but my gratitude contains a petition,
too. Lord, in addition to making me funnier, could you help me to see the
humor? I didn't get the genetic base. Thank you, Lord, for what you're doing
now. And getting back to those naked white men, how that all came down, it was
right after the election and I walked into the fitness center. I'd been looking
at people driving their cars. Every time I saw a white man in a car, I said to
myself, I know how you voted. I
walked downstairs at the fitness center and there they were, naked white men. I
laughed. I said to myself, All you naked white men, you just elected Donald
Trump President of the United States.
I had my notebook with me. Before I
could forget it, I wrote it down. I wrote it as a poem in four lines, and then I
wrote it into a longer poem, too. and it was published in Letters to America.
People wrote back, Nice joke, Jim. I gave myself a pat on the back myself. Hey
that's pretty good. All that happened inside of two months. And yesterday after
stretching, I walked naked into that empty sauna, wash rag full of water for
the hot rocks. As rocks steamed, the first man walks in, says, with a question,
Meditating? I nod. He says, I pray. That sounded funny. Not funny ha-ha, but
funny odd. Even then, I knew, he just told me he had a better way. Christians
voted for him, too. And even the women. It wasn't completely true about the
naked white man. When his friend entered the sauna there was no beating around
the bush. America was great again, already, and he was feeling it. He was
letting us know. He was telling it, how it was going to be, beginning tomorrow.
This attempt at humor. OK. That's what
it is. It began with an email of a friend with cancer. She was urging love on
this day. January 20. I wanted to respond with my heart. I wanted to say
something funny. I wanted to laugh at myself. And all this did happen. Like the
joke from the man in El Salvador. The man who said, The mayor says we all have
running water. Show me the faucets. I get that. I wanted to make myself the
butt of the joke. But I did get it. And gave it. Finding that speech in the
Safeway store. Inventing the word, Trumpero. I thought that was good in the
moment. I thought it could beat cancer. Maybe humor could help that mayor lay
pipe. Put water in them. Curse moral humor. Jesus.
Take the crucified people down from the cross. No water can put out this fire.
Historic, he said again and again.
Historic. We're already back. It brought back not quite memories, but alcoholic
euphoria. Post soccer-game violence. Three naked white men in the sauna, that's
what it looked like. That's what he thought. He hadn't considered the
possibilities of who I might be. Not stranger. Not other. Not even white. He
didn't understand the world he was living in, or my reminder of what a sauna
is. I tried the second time without the same good will, and when the Fuck you
came out it came out like it was supposed to. Fuck you.
On my way out the door, again like that.
Fuck you.
Jim Bodeen
20 January 2017
THE MAN BEHIND THE MAN IN THE PEW
IN THE GRAY LONG-SLEEVED T-SHIRT
--for J. and all
pastors who bring a social gospel
The man in the gray t-shirt, long-sleeved.
Sleeved pulled to the elbows, leather necklace.
Arms out over the backs of both pews.
His son sitting beside him, but outside
of his arms, His eyes don't follow the pastor,
locked straight ahead, but on the cross?
I can't tell, and I don't see his face.
What does he hear? His son moves.
It's a long sermon for his son
in the blue sweatshirt. It's longer
for the man in the gray t-shirt. Sermons
are supposed to be long for children.
I like helping people,
the pastor says.
The pastor, a friend, my former pastor,
half my age, younger than my son, my peer,
and deeper friend,
recently installed in a new church
on the east coast in a state that flipped red.
We cannot remain looking
at each other as others,
the pastor says. My
friend says. Because
he videotaped his sermon, I am sitting in the pew
with his congregation. I am sitting
in the pew two rows behind the man
with the fidgeting son in the gray shirt.
The man with his sleeves pushed up.
The one with his arms stretched out
across the back of the pew,
eyes straight ahead. This uncomfortable man.
The camera has placed me here.
If his eyes are on the cross, they are so
abstractly. The man could be
on the cross himself, but for my belief
that his body has rejected this just truth of Jesus.
His body is rejecting the Sermon on the Mount.
Don't have a
discussion. Sit with them,
the pastor says. I am watching all of this
on YouTube, three thousand miles away.
I have been that man.
I'm not judging anyone.
I'm in this sermon, too.
The pastor also suffers.
Jim Bodeen
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