SUNDAY IN THE PARK

SUNDAY DRIVE IN YELLOWSTONE

It's a road of hellos and goodbyes

and this day, Sunday, is mostly a day

where leavings take place in moments

full of ways confusing us all. The last thing

in beginning calls for grand children

to get out of the community pool

and assemble by the teepee

for photographs. One child will go

with us following pictures.

It's Sunday, as I said,

all in all things are ok.

Nevertheless, it's a sad time.

It's a sad time all over this country

and there are gaps in the story.

I've been reading geology,

a man not good at numbers.

Wife, granddaughter, and myself,

drive through Yellowstone

crisscrossing the Continental Divide

every few minutes. Wild rivers

meander. I collect names of creeks

for a friend who writes creek poems.

Three days ago on the Nez Perce Trail,

I wrote the year, 1889,

that a photograph was taken of Chief Joseph,

that hangs in a mostly empty restaurant

in the town of Kooskia. Highway 12 West,

following the Clearwater and Lochsa rivers,

wild ones, was completed in 1962.

John McPhee's epic, Annals of a Former World,

the copy I'm reading, is old enough to be placed

on the free book table in the sun outside

the Ellensburg Library. Lakes don't last,

he says, and I remember this sentence

as we drive by Yellowstone Lake.

The Great Lakes are only 20,000 years old.

My granddaughter, turned 10

on Summer Solstice. Her parents call

on grandma's phone to tell her they've gotten her

an IPhone 5 for her birthday.

Lakes don't show up on the geologic record,

McPhee writes. In rock columns,

more time is missing than is there.

What is there commemorates moments,

drops of rain. Reason enough

to risk everything for love,

that short everything and all

that may even be forgotten

in the course of a long day,

of a Sunday drive. Those sad goodbyes

of grandchildren are not even permanent.

It's true they're all away from home,

but they'll see each other

on the 4th of July, bank on it, even

surrounded as we are by violence

and, well, if you're in America,

you know. Nothing's wrong

I say to my wife, what is more natural

than children's tears? Sunday morning,

I read my first poem in days:

a father kayaking with his daughter

worships in the Church of the Outdoors.

Fifty years ago, a soldier in the Canal Zone,

wearing dress Khakis studying Wallace Stevens,

I memorize Sunday Morning,

and when I muster out after returning

from the war in Vietnam, I write

an essay comparing Sunday Morning

to Kristofferson's, Sunday Morning Coming Down.

Late coffee and oranges, I say to my wife

as my granddaughter naps in the back seat.

Other things happen on this day,

good things, I remind my friend

moving into, for him, a new house.

We'll have a sage ceremony.

Another poem reminds me

all places are sacred,

not only this first national park.

It jolts me, bitter irony

in the naming of Old Faithful.

Children incredulous with adults

look off in child-scream

eye-speak in deep magma.

Field workers in accelerated time.

Jim Bodeen

25 June 2017

Jackson Hole, WY