TRAVELS WITH MARTIN LUTHER

HOW MARTIN LUTHER GOT TO NORTH DAKOTA

is beyond me, and not my call.
Ones followed him, calling themselves
Lutheran, and they begat me.
I spent the morning pulling Chinese Lettuce,
a weed whose name I learned only yesterday.
I'm out west now, old, still tagged
with my beginnings, and a Catholic
imagination (as much as one can be had)
(not being there in the cradle)
for having spent much of my life
around Monks, Benedictine, Trappist,
and Chan Buddhist. That's a mouthful
for someone with prairie roots
(wild roses everywhere still hunker against wind)
and I suppose still being here
you might wonder where this is going.
It's going towards the absolutely other,
what can't be discussed in any sense
and puts me out like it or not
with no insurance, flood, fire, tornado
and plain health if such a thing exists.

I guess I've said too much already.

Jim Bodeen
23 May 2017


MEDITATION IN THE PEW

Be known to us, O Lord,
that we may be your risen
body in the world.
            Lutheran Offertory Prayer

Martin Luther did some
name changing himself.

When he went into hiding in 1521,
he was called Junker Jörg. After

posting his 95 Theses, he called himself
Martinus Eleutherius, Martin the Free.

Cloaca, the Latin word for sewer
is how Luther referred to the world.

In his native German, Luther
called the world a piece of shit.

Jim Bodeen
28 May--31 May 2017


MEMORIAL DAY MORNING

MEMORIAL DAYMORNING
IN THE GARDEN, SITTING BETWEEN
BLOOD GOOD MAPLE AND JACQUEMONTE BIRCH


Watching the Women's College World Series
on ESPN, I hear a coach (whose name I don't get),
say, The team that relaxes first will win,
and send this to my brother, who coaches
women's fast-pitch at the Community College,

and he messages back, That's right.
Memorial Day Weekend in a heat wave.
Ken Burns previews his documentary
on Vietnam, saying, In many ways,
it's our Second Civil War. Karen and I

have tickets to the Seattle opening.
Yesterday my granddaughter asks me
what I've been reading. Children's books,
re-discovering children's literature
isn't only for kids. A biography on

Maurice Sendak. The picture book
is my battle ground, where I hope
to win my wars. The mask that gives
something to hide behind makes it
unnecessary to hide. Max is in his

wolfsuit. Standing on two books
his tail rolls out lazily on the floor.
His stuffed dog hangs from a string
on a clothes hanger to tied bedsheets.
Max fixes it to the wall with a hammer,

making mischief. He's not happy.
I sit in shade of elegant trees, mature
specimens, surrounding the perimeter
of this secular monastery, protected.
A white plastic fence seals this

domestic lot in contemplation. Bonsai
trees in Chinese pots, sentinels,
instruct me to go slower yet, to sit.
Leaf tissue sends signals
traveling at a speed of one-third inch

per minute as they determine
which predators are beneficial,
which ones dangerous. I am slower
than the tree. Do they sense
toxins in humans approaching them

the way the child in mother's womb
anticipates lack of oxygen
as mom inhales smoke
from her cigarette? Dreaming
healthy trees is my work,

I haven't the skill, or will,
to manipulate branches with wire.
A small plane from the nearby airport
drones overhead. Here is Afghanistan
and requests for more munitions.

Jim Bodeen
29 May 2017


MEMORIAL DAY, 2017

            --for Phil and Ron

Where to start? Whitman's Wound-Dresser
sent by a friend? (...Whoever you are,/ follow
without noise and be strong of heart)--unable
to read until after sunset, finding again those doors,
elder poet not missing a single cot,
not one do I miss, firm with each. Start here?

Not where I came in with the day,
threading through scripture, through poems
from sacred fire ring, each stone
brought by special ones, here and gone.
Get to Joseph? Get to the pastor? Jail ministry?
Ones who left town and didn't leave. That joy--

start with the friend? Remember Joseph's
brothers throwing him in the pit, selling him
to traveling merchants? That story, mine, baby!
Hold on! That's my old pastor talking. He'll never
let me keep it, I say, hearing his voice--Joseph
story, enacted here on the cross. No

to Joseph is no to Jesus on Golgotha. I love
this man, and tell him so, hearing his musings,
compromised muse alliterated with the M
in his last name. Dear Ron, musing, I love it so,
this way. How to respond? one asks.
Favored one, racheted up. But something

else, one has to wait for. The familiar
in the confrontation. Voice of the pastor.
Voice of man become friend. Friends voices.
...bloody door slammers...reaches through.
One feels the foot, or mashed fingers.
One hears the bullet as door hits frame.

Door slamming become end of all listening,
end of language. How does one say,
This is beautiful, but Whitman removed the hinges.
I hear him, though, seeing him
with us in the small church, his slow cadence,
developing steps, building the sentence,

Christ-muse at his back or (beside),
urging language forward. Multi-cultural Joseph.
His door swinging both ways.
The impossibility of a slamming door.
The coat always many-colored for me,
nobody left behind. Slamming Joseph

and his brothers right into Jesus,
helping/making/showing something
that can't be done on one's own, showing
self connive with evil. Unable to forgive.
That re-sounds. One hears. We hear. I hear.
And the door slam turns on us, becoming

what else! The door slam turns,--
Bultmannian now, apocalyptic end.
To say anything resembling what is safe
or re-reassuring about faith, any deal-making
with the comfortable. Thanks all,
Memorial Day morning, this head wave

beauty coming at us, a scream to wake me.
Love from here, this being part of how
day carries, old man who was young
on the hospital ward in war. Joseph in the pit
is Christ at Golgotha, my No! part
of the day shout, listening too,

Whitman opening doors of time,
on, on...open hospital doors! ...tear not
the bandage away...hard the breathing rattles.
(Come sweet death! be persuaded...in mercy.)
Cancel the I, validate witness, testimony.
Christ-embraced. Suffering re-sounding abundance.

Jim Bodeen
29-30 May 2017




THE CHILDREN'S SUITE

THE CHILDREN'S SUITE

Fanny did all that work
after she missed with the prince
and later, her husband said,
Good enough, Fanny, Good enough.

What makes a dream a dream?
Doesn't the empirical world
make us also dizzy!

Sitting up, saying to myself,
You're not sleeping!
You're not looking around!
Saying to that longing other
I won't go on until we connect.

How were you rewarded for your silence?

2. Puzzle pieces of cups and saucers rattle
in my hands,
amid all the questions of sadness
influencing how we think of ourselves.
Whose voice matters more?

Tell me what you're working through
Schools are more segregated
than they were when we were growing up

Tell me about you

There we were in a truck
full of green things
The missing piece
is my favorite because
this is the book
my first child fell in love with

We were moving directly
into the path of trouble--
wind itself was picking up signals
from last syllables
coming from our mouths.

Jim Bodeen
24-26 May 2017

LA MARCHA PARA INMIGRANTES EN YAKIMA

NOTES ON THE IMMIGRATION MARCH IN YAKIMA

MAY DAY, 2017








Marcha para los inmigrantes en Yakima, Primer de mayo, 2017. Immigration March in Yakima, May Day, 2017 con mensaje de Mathew Tomaskin, del tribu Yakama. Yakama Mathew Tomaskin's speech before the march is here in its entirety. Movie by Jim Bodeen





NOTAS ANTES DE LA MARCHA
NOTAS DESPÚES DE LA MARCHA       
NOTAS EN MI CUADERNO
NOTAS CANTANDO EN MI CUARTO
NOTAS CAMINANDO CON MI PERRO
NOTAS SOBRE MI CARTA AL SEÑOR,

Notes, too, to the surrounding music
Notes to the Bishop.
I don't know too many, but I know a few.
Notes on my questions before the march.
Running water for everyone the mayor says,
and the woman walking with me laughs,
Show me the faucets.
                                     First question:
Who wrote the song, Precious Lord?
Hint, hint, it wasn't Elvis. And this one,
Can more people sing Las Casas de Cartón
than can sing, Love Me Do?

More notes on the dangers of the poetic line.
Matt Tomaskin said,
We didn't cross that line,
that line crossed us.

Scan that river.

The priest says, No tengan miedo, no tengan miedo.
la iglesia los acompaña. And I have that one on film.
You can take it to the bank. We're here, he says,
para apollar los inmigrantes.
                                                My own notes
from the church bulletin on Sunday, quote the pastor saying,
"Welcome the stranger. The Bible is clear on this." Bien chido, pastora.
My response, also in notes, ask,
If you don't welcome the stranger
how can you sit next to your wife?

El pueblo esta presente. And that's true, too.

el pueblo unido
jamas sera vencido

Empirical facts on that one, still aren't in.

The pastor talked about Jesus being a refugee as a child.
I was sitting in the pew next to a young man
who, like Jesus, had also been a refugee,
crossing, as North American Christians like to say,
as an illegal. I think pastor was talking about Baby Jesus, too.
I happen to know that my young friend,
on one of the four times he crossed, it was night,
he was in diapers, and the helicopter swooped down
with its lights on and got him and his mom.
Like I said to him after church,
if you want to know if Jesus was afraid
add those chopper blades and the big lights coming out of the sky.

No tengan miedo, no tengan miedo.
This is the line that crossed us,
the line we sing about in our song.
Escuelas internados.
These notes from the earth.
Notas desde la tierra.
Somos/as desde la tierra.

Notas en movimiento.
Notes on the move.

I don't think there are shortcuts for any of us.
Those men in ties on tv calling for us go back get back in line.
There's a line makes me laugh. No lloremos. No lloremos.
No hay atajos. No hay.
These notes from the long song walking.
Some of these be mine.
We are so many. We bring so much. We are so, so beautiful.
We're bringing the tortillas?
We're bringing the love.

Jim Bodeen
1 May 2007--16 de mayo 2017





Cheerio



CHEERIO

Maple Syrup
frozen blueberries
honey-sweetened oats

Jim Bodeen
14 May 2017


When We Came Back

AND HOW WE LIVED OUR LIVES

He was student body president
at the university, and became the voice
I followed as he trailed Cacciato
in and out of the war. When the war
opened for me twenty years later
I looked again and wrote my poems,
this time wondering if.
                                    Would we
ever cross stories?

The small college I returned to
after I came home in 1968,
was bringing him to town
for The Big Read. He had been
infantry, 11B in Quang Tri Province
in 69 and 70, had encountered
the ghosts of my time. His unit
had re-entered My Lai
before it had come out,
uncovered itself, the government
pinning guilt
on Lieutenant Calley
what was everywhere.

Qui Nhon, Binh Dinh Province,
bordering Quang Tri from the south
where two evac hospitals,
67th Evac and 85th Evac took casualties
round the clock, from January through July
when bombing stopped,
is where I was--at the 85th.

I write in Jubilee time
across 50 years, remembering
what got written on forms
for every casualty
who made it to us,
the narrative of what happened.
The narrative repeated hundreds
and hundreds of times each month,
repeating itself in numbers
that cannot be named,
named or numbered.
The revelation
in chapter and verse.
Still trying to bring it down to size.
Still trying to see it was that big.
My time. What he wrote about.  
When I was, well, earlier                                                 



DRESSED IN ORANGE BASEBALL CAP WITH BLACK LETTERS
READING HENDRIX IN ALL CAPS, BLACK BLAZER,
SLACKS, SHORT, JUST ABOUT SAME HEIGHT AS ME,
AND A SKINNY GREEN TIE WITH RED SPLOTS,
O'BRIEN HAS BEGUN WHEN I WALK IN TO TAKE MY SEAT


Vivid immediate bang, first words,
how the misfit became the misfit.

...the stink of a half-truth...
   
figure out the context
what he's trying to do, where he's going--
that'll tell you who he is
what I'm trying to do
where I'm going
who I am

What's that in the air
cottonwood

Just into his 70s arms wrapped
around Hemingway's ice berg
Explanation doesn't explain dyslexics don't become killers
Outside that hotel room, that cat in the rain
that woman, the man on the bed

Where the father comes into the story
Drinking at the VFW, drinking at the grain elevator,
Smart things to say so he'd stop drinking
Mother looking out the window
and the young wife and the cat in the rain
The craft of it, bad and mediocre telling
leave no room for the reader

Yesterday, for example,

Walking into this room
I gave my father the book and he told me
it was too much like real life
The other one had his Hemingway
Ice bergs and vanishing fathers

I gave up writing sentences

I committed myself to the sentence

What had once been fun for me hardened.
Where I tried to be me let up
Now once in a while

I walked out
just walked

this is how
it once was

it once was
how is this

this once was
this was once

This meditation in green
this sideways awful

What wants to be kept
and doesn't belong

For me it all mirrored
young black girls boarding
the city bus
with their
God bless


BONSAI SENSEI LECTURES FOR EIGHT HOURS ON WATERING TREES

After I returned from Japan, these trees
Sensei said, Wire it like this, so that the branches will follow
He looked at it and said, It's all wrong, it's all wrong, this is the worst,
and just like that I was no longer a soldier

Ultimate health
resisting everything
we're going to do to it
it needs to be healthy

Dr. Earth
with its good bacteria
equal numbers

Work around the poet
once a month
with little hills of food

The three things
trees need
water retention
oxygen
lava, pumice, akadama

Moving soil cuts roots
Every pot needs top soil
to stabilize

Jim Bodeen
25 April--12 May 2017



EARLY RAIN

MUCH LATER

Still morning
Trees so tall, reminders
in these moments
beyond their breathing

Jim Bodeen
11 May 2017

Walking the Yard

WALKING THE YARD

Before I do anything (after waking)

Before I do anything
each day

I walk the yard

Returning to the house
I sit for coffee
and write in the notebook

walking the yard

Jim Bodeen
14 April-9 May 2017

Jubilee Teacher, That One

THAT TEACHER

What's his name I
don't know his name
but when I came back
from the war
in 1968
I took his class
in the evening
a drama class
at the community college
that one
I'd been out of the country
two years
he called me into the hall
before class started
Come on, he said
I'm going to show you
how to walk
into the room

Jim Bodeen
6 May 2017

Fingers in the Topsoil


MAKING TOPSOIL FOR NEWLY PLANTED BONSAI TREES

Wet long-fibered natural moss
place strategically around trunk
of tree, holds moisture, establishes
the system for what comes next
Its relationship with pumice
and lava rock instant  Wet
fibers of the Sphagnum
lay around the tree
like tiny branches not
unlike a skeleton sweat lodge
Now the screened mosses
will fall from your fingers
into pockets beside the soil mix
This part fingers from moss
to soil cushions, sensuous, spongy

Jim Bodeen
28 April 2017

                                                                                           

BENEATH SPARKLING STAR RIVER

Clouds in western sky
drop rain as I settle, begin
freeing the Shimpaku Juniper
from black plastic root trainer,
preparing to cut roots young
before placing it in the shallow
unglazed clay pot. Securing

the tree on lava rock
with wire and chop sticks
followed with a mix of pumice,
red lava and akadama from Japan
is the horticulturist's art.
A thin layer of top soil,
1/8 inch deep, ground
from dense matted moss
on Chinook Pass, one cell thick,
and sphagnum collected from bogs
for water management.
Millions of naked spoors.
Rain drips from my hat
unexpectedly in this desert valley
in this outdoor sanctuary,
this studio refuge
where I sit between
Columnar Hornbeam
and Ed Wood Half-Moon Maple.

Jim Bodeen

26 April 2017


SCRATCHING THE SURFACE STONE

Have I sat for hours
Insight come and bees buzz gone
Incessantly still

Jim Bodeen
3-6 May 2017

DOG WITNESS AND DISTRACTIONS

I BELIEVE THAT I COULD GO ON
LIKE THIS FOREVER, THAT THIS
IS DIRECT RESPONSE, EACH LINE
EACH STANZA CORRECTLY WEIGHTED
TO THE DISTRACTION BEFORE ME

My father died and I could never
do enough before or after to make
Mom happy. So the horrible things
happened, and surprise of surprises,

I’m greeting the mountain
that happened my way. The answer
to the man’s question
is dealt with directly

in every poem I’ve ever written.
I write poems every day.
I don’t remember many
of the poems, and most of the time

I don’t think one is any
better or worse than others.
Nobody has had better friends
or more teachers, ways to use

language and look at river stones.
I had to bring my mother’s voice
under control, and wait for years
and years before I could hear

my father speak. He didn’t talk
but he showed up off to one side.
My wife didn’t leave me
and I learned across half

a century that praise
is neither here nor there—
try telling that when
worship committee wonders

what wine works fast
in the blood. Downstream,
downstream. The gardener
who captures my compost

air exhaling can be to the body
that wants to move, how
maintaining the breathing
mirrors day and night.

How much more than enough
money helped, how each allocated
month of the GI Bill
contributed as much as the war,

how the failed Windsor knot
along with my complete lack
of funny slid under ambition.
I could have been more or less

one word inserted into the title.
Before turning in, changing
the tone, the manager moves
addressing the outcome.

Why did I become the cook
I am? What law of discernment
showed me that walking away
is another fall into word. To-

wards. Where else to back?
Abyss itself. Insisting this too
is life without a net,
cataloging ghosts

who died at 39. When did
that start?  That one man
said empathy defined treasure
the woman who called it disease.

The walk. The run. The steam.
Nakedness and transparency in trees.
The arthritis and the pruners.
Listening and listening.

Jim Bodeen
2 May 2017

Welcome Back

WELCOME BACK

When calls began arriving,
men angry and women traumatized,
I found myself first engaged,
then immersed. Sometime later

I knew I had been here before.
Belief within me, the letter
triggers the poem going beyond.
Called out by God or natural forces,
undetected and undetonated
bombs hidden in my brain
exploding. When I recovered,
cleared by modern medicine,
[And the Machi in Chile reading urine],
I was left with no filters.
Some of the blindness mine.
30 years ago. 50 years ago.
The Again and again of it.
That became the journey,
walking into Safeway,
overheard comments in pews.

Arrival of the autocratic state
slides in with a sigh of relief
in the community. You can
hear people say,
from this election: Now
can we have some rest?
Can we just move on? First as question,
repeating itself as imperative,
Just move on, already!

People leaving fingerprints everywhere.
Would I still drink from the common cup?
I remember Christians returning
to the tiny cups in droves
during the height of the Aids epidemic.
Did I have anything in common
with the faithful? I know how you vote.

You've been fingerprinted by your coffee group.
Your doctor files your medical records.
Everyone in the choir knows who's giving blow jobs.
Where did you put your Constitution?

Living the unfiltered life returns.
I recognize it in the young, going active,
for the first time in their lives.
Robert Moses walking through Africa after SNCC.
Start the poetry now. Crazy Horse dressed
in clothes made in China.

            Anyway,
What a word, that. Anyway
you can. Make that way.
Make a way any way you can,

Way Maker.

Jim Bodeen
25 February 2017



















Little trees hunker down, 
make oxygen from toxins. 
Breathing naturally, 
their tiny bursts erupt 
already enlightened, 
resisting. Guerillas 
whose root system 
is the youngest part 
of their being.

Jim Bodeen
May Day, 2017