MAKE THOSE SHIELDS

UNSETTLED BY THE TIMES

My shield-making friend

calls for good news.

Good news for me

is having the shield-making friend.

Jim Bodeen

23 February 2017

MAKE THOSE SHIELDS

I tell my friend. Keep making

those shields. Just back from

the mountains, skiing with grand

children during President's Week,

I found myself at lunch

playing with my cell phone,

writing in a small notebook,

doodling, when I looked again

at the words in the photo.

Words in the photo? Yes,

One granddaughter had pulled

a toy spider from her backpack

left over from Halloween.

I put the spider

on top of a baggie

filled with gold fish crackers.

The pocket notebook,

smaller than a Post-it page,

had recorded

what I could not see.

After I placed the three images

together on the pine table

flooded with sunlight

I took the picture

with my cell phone.

I discovered

I had been using

my grand children

as shields, human shields,

 to keep me

from seeing

what was happening

to my country.

Jim Bodeen

22 February 2017

DIFFERENT TAKES ON THE BLACK SPIDER

Reaching for the page in the notebook,

unsettled, word of the other

asking for clarification, and holding it,

Karen enters the room with word

of a different departure. The mind,

capable of reversal, delivers a miracle.

Jim Bodeen

23 February 2017

INQUIRY INTO OBEDIENCE TRAINING

AND INCREASED POETIC OUTPUT

One can't resist the dog

at the Animal Shelter.

Did you send me her name?

Thanks for sending address

for post cards. Now that

Bob Marley has stirred us

again, we've been released

from all sexual tension--

still agitated. This is serial.

We must love more people

than we know as part of our vow.

Can we use this juice

in produce? Draw the line

at say, ten poems a day.

I'm on the mountain

with kids this weekend.

Touching down with what's

real: Black water tank

frozen in the mothership.

This shit, all mine.

Can it heat our home

after the meltdown?

Jim Bodeen

16 Februay 2016

LETTERS AND LETTER THEORY

ATTRACT ME IN-TURN TO YOUR POST CARD

Trying to imagine apiaries

in outdoor museums, say

the High Desert out of Bend,

walk-lined with carded

poems, all yours, pulling

tension tight, what I like.

The Gobi-Rattler Room

a kind of museum, filling

with bird-like sounds

of your soundings, a kind

of depth charge--temperature

of Earth, rising un-song.

But your birds always in tune,

changing flight patterns

falling from the sky,

singing even in their leaving.

Jim Bodeen

15 April 2017