Storypath/Cuentocamino: : May 2018

LAST SPRING EDGE-RUN BREATH

STEEPED IN BREWING LEAVES

Too hot for baseball

Too hot for snow mountain skis

What to do, just what

Stashed low out of sun

One more hour before last game

Six innings of ball

CLOSING DOWN

Blistered lips word parched

Tethered twisting in mare's nest

Sun mountain descent

How notebook returns

harvesting May emptiness

Nothing doing trade

Nothing to weigh

Late May word branch breeze

Summer grass blade chew

Jim Bodeen

26 May--31 May 2018

BREWING IN THE GARDEN

HOME AFTER BEING GONE

Head full of the world

I can't hardly shuck peanuts

without taking off for the sidelines.

Children playing organized games

as somber old men. Walking

the garden my roses

cross branches as I approach.

How can I brew tea

in a state like this?

When my grandson's team

was being ten-runned

under high desert sun

the woman yelling

for more score

walking her great dog

back and forth in front of me,

dog pulling on its chain

trying for shade

under my broken chair.

It wasn't the dog then.

The dog's not running

through my roses.

Jim Bodeen

30 May 2018

In that other life, an earlier one, with young people, we’d gather in a circle and pass out the skinny books, asking, Who wants to play Rose? Who wants to play Troy Maxson. Who wants Cory. Bono? Lyons doesn’t come in today. Good choice, though. The play, called Fences, and it has everything. August Wilson wrote it. Young men who still held dreams of playing baseball all their lives liked it. They run into a father and son—tell you that. It has sex and booze and violence. It even has an angel. Boys and girls no longer boys and girls would take parts they knew about, even while believing these same thoughts had nothing to do with school. Anger, the one thing they did know about, more than love that brought them here, all of it walled off in deep freezers, packed behind clothes, and phones and headphones, all the protecting gear promising to defend and conceal them. They could read words denied them. Word prohibited, taboo. Beyond the beyond to prohibition itself. Feelings. Where no one would get to. If they could get to their feelings they wouldn’t come. And here they were. Reading tentatively, then, almost in whispers, not getting there. The little by little working on them. Tiny breakthroughs. Words reverberating in bed at night as they tried to get to sleep. Stuff they knew. What never gets encountered in school. They knew humor and its cruelty. This was different. As different and as fresh as garden produce. Farmer’s Market innocence. One day, then. Maybe one of the young women will say, I’ll take Troy. Another will say, I’ll be Rose. I read ahead. I’ll be Gabriel. These ones have found it. They’ve gone beyond anger. Moving towards outrage. Finding what they know. What they learned at home and didn’t have a word for. Still didn’t for that matter. Moving now. Moving towards who they want to become.

Jim Bodeen

14 May 2018

Maggie Anderson Reading at James Wright Festival

Maggie Anderson reads from "Dear All" at the James Wright Poetry Festival in Martins Ferry, Ohio, 21 April 2018.

NOURISH BEGINNINGS m.r.

MEETING PLACES

"It isn't that one brings life together--it's

that one will not allow it to be torn apart."

Muriel Rukeyser

Why we are the way we are

beats hell out of me, Muriel,

you here in so many ways

feels like a pulse. When I had begun

to say has something to do

with your earlier one. What

begins when we still don't know

creates unbound commons of

gratitude, grace's way of handing

on your word, where poems arrive

as energy fields. Who anticipated

transfer from poet to reader

mirroring time travel of water

from root to apex of the ancient fir?

That slow construct and discharge.

However, never how, not report---making.

Jim Bodeen

11 May 2018

BASEBALL AND GOD

WEARING A NEW BELT FROM SHOE STORE REPAIR IN UNIONTOWN,

OLD VAQUERO COWBOY LEATHER FROM THE MAN FROM GUATEMALA,

(THE BELT ITSELF A GIFT), THE BELT SEWN IN MAGNIFICENT
BLUE THREAD, HILO, BELT ITSELF, CALLED CINCHA IN GUATEMALA, NOT CINTURRÓN, AND LIKE HE SAYS, AT THE PIRATE GAME IN PNC PARK,
HE ARRIVES IN THE NEW TERRITORY HUCK TALKS ABOUT,
THINKING OF GERARD MANLY HOPKINS AND HIS FAILURE
TO GIVE UP POETRY. AUGUST WILSON'S HILL BEFORE HIM

Sitting in sunshine over Sixth Street Bridge,

two days after dark, dreaming deep,

baseball in Josh Gibson's town, wipe

what can be cleaned, clean. Shelling

peanuts, neither a Tiger nor Pirate,

remembering historic Topp cards

from North Dakota childhood,

the small paperback of early ball parks

with hand-drawn stadium illustrations,

some ownership surfaces, looking out

at Allegheny River, saying three rivers

chant-like, saying too, Chicago, St. Louis,