WALKING COWICHE CANYON LATE OCTOBER
15 minutes, 2 songs from home.
Soundtrack from Vietnam
the film--
after 50 years
by Ken
Burns/Lynn Novick
Ray Charles remembering America
how they
sang it
as
kids in school
You are my sunshine
sunshine now
cool
soulshine
Second song a bridge
Simon &
Garfunkel
that water
still
in trouble
*
Kick off shoes in
socks
Boots in
back reading
Gary Snyder's poem
from
mid-August
Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Snyder
forgetting
what he's read
now in his late 80s
20 years
after he wrote that
poem
maybe
more
unbound
poet unbound poem
his friends in cities
his poem
resonating
pulling
on boots
Each next
song
a buddy
reaching
out
*
Folded, blank
sheet
in pocket handy
light pack
with
notebook
and Alexie's mother's
passing
book,
gifted/grifted
me
by Inklings book store owner
Stopping
at
first bench
notebook
Sherman
talking listening
you don't have to say
I haven't been able
to open
that book
more
than a month
now--
saying
I had other
things
to read--
which
is true
Everything good between
us good
I became
an
inkling
when
I
came home from war
*
ENTRANCES TO HOLY PLACES
MOST OFTEN HUMBLE--OFTEN NASTY
REFLECTING NEGLECT, AND--WELL--
CULTURAL BLINDNESS AND AMNESIA,
EVEN WITH SONGBIRDS, WATER RUNNING MUSIC
Bleached grasses against sun-warmed stone
changes things in a hurry. Time short,
October-pressed, late fall light
guarantees color and shadow
something to savor in every image
slow the camera down
and--
Look!
When I say, North Dakota,
it's not a good or bad thing,
it's everything--so much gold
in water and fallen leaves.
Stop and sit by Ron Riehl's basalt
stone. Helen's memorial
midpoint in this canyon hike.
Ten years gone. Ron's dress shirts,
satin, silk. elegant, six of them
from Helen, given to me
for the rare occasion
of vestments--impeccably
cared for, starched formal
and Shakespearean,
like formal titles
set above the poem
a carved typeface, the seraph
itself an artist's signature.
Nature conservancy in a shirt,
remembers this, and more
as trail accesses water
where my dogs drank, cooled
themselves, those two black labs,
Lacy Dreamwalker, Sister Sadie Sadie.
This trail turns around.
Sitting on fallen basalt,
apple, and Mexican cookies,
las canastas, with a drop
of strawberry jam in center.
Walking back the afternoon sun
causes aspen leaves to fall
in front of feet on trail.
Jim Bodeen
26 October 2017
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