*
BACK AND FORTH TENSION
Strong in wind, stronger in trunk,
he goes back and forth,
distance helps him see
his experience
altered as well as true
his old teacher
still in his garden
and his hand by hand
exchange,
spots of time
he catches his breath
The tree in its ancestral beauty
retains its majesty even in death,
its bark, often not appearing
until it reaches 150 years of age,
becomes something other
than root or branch, the wild
mountain ancestor
collected before me,
less than two feet in height
slow-grown over two centuries
of short-seasoned climate
Re-creating salvaged beauty,
then, sharp-bladed tools, deep
clean before cut and prune
Cool this morning, outside
shirtless with knives, poems,
the tree and a novel by Ondaatje,
poet inside a story enabling
sentences like the following,
The mother was often away,
but his absence, like his presence,
rarely mattered, out of this,
the morning, a way towards
mid-day
This past week marks
the 50th anniversary of his return
from the war in SE Asia, where
he worked as sergeant in an evac
unit of an evacuation hospital
during a time of chaos and casualties
threatening to overwhelm
the system's capacity, heavy casualties
on all sides, and his return
to the States came after air bombs
were stopped and all sides
exhausted and spent,
a
return
after his 23d birthday,
at jet-speed with no room
for reflection, continued immersion,
a wedding and college campus
Married at the end of that year,
1968, confronting 1919 itself,
for polarities and violence
A jubilee year, 2018,
marked by our children
for celebration, amnesty
and cancellation of debts,
the prayer of my wife and I
Could we just have family
Extended family, I ask,
feeling anxiety tightening
my body My wife
looks up, asking,
Who do you have in mind
Returning to the yard
by way of my study, my lap
full of tiny branches
and decades of dirt grown
into its bark, I've retrieved
a bright yellow cotton rope
about 1/4 inch thick
and wind it around yucca
canes already wound
in black leather last summer
Canes with their spiny tops
left after producing tiny
promontories for white petals,
prickly and tensile, barbed
prototypes for the wire
The wound canes calling to him
during garden walks, soft yellow
cords will not interfere
with the natural lines,
which of these trees
know how welcoming
they are, greeting them,
feeling a return after this
long human passage of time
Yusef Komunyakaa observes
President Barack Obama reading
Derek Walcott's Collected Poems
in a similar manner to Walt Whitman
in muddy boots outside the White House
looking in the window at Abraham Lincoln,
separated only by glass. Knowing this,
holding possibility at this level
lights up the White House
putting a bit of swagger in his garden steps.
I was given to Ray Charles at 15
at the paper shack where I carried
The Seattle Times to Lake Washington
beach front homes seven days a week
on my bicycle, walking the bike
the mile up the hill after my route.
The boy who introduced me to race
radio in Seattle was the older brother
of a paper carrier who belonged to Demolay,
the premier developer of moral behavior
in young men between the ages of 12-21.
Once I found the station
I never saw him again. Me, a boy
from North Dakota, had embraced
the night vision, neither exile, nor outlaw,
but one who didn't fit anywhere,
including clothes, becoming part of each,
towards the illegal, no access, no return,
all applied to one like me, with books
telling about the lives of poets,
I didn't know anyone, who else
were they written for, you win again,
who was Ray singing for if not for me
These small trees collected for character
and thick trunks in Bonsai pots
surviving cold winters, withered
under blistering temperatures
of desert sunshine, baking in Chinese pots
I would remember them
in desert beauty landscapes, stones
older than anything I knew
witnessing in prophet-boxed grandeur.
Jim Bodeen
16-20 August 2018
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