DREAMED WATER WORD STAYS
for Lee
Bassett
All morning playing with mulch,
composting North Park
while looking for misplaced books,
working on poems--eating sausage
leftover from breakfast dinner
three nights ago. Douse
in green Tabasco, what I found
when I couldn't find deliverance
for the damned, confounding
Karl Barth hounds me defending
Bultmann again. Bultmann
defend, confess, send and receive,
as riddles increase the graces.
Here in the notebook, the lost books
bring forth Mountain Home,
Hinton's first anthology of Chinese poets,
and because I'd just read his translations
of Su Tung-p'o in his big book following
a study of Burton Watson's of the same,
I am released of my search for Barth.
Hinton says some things differently
here, than in the big anthology
with the white cover, and says a couple
of things, twisted a smidgeon, so fine,
and this, on water:
consciousness,
wandering like water,
how East Side Su's poems
all enact in daily life. And this, in being clear,
water has an inner nature
enduring all transformations. Perhaps,
he says, (What do you think, Gary?)
the greatest rivers and mountains poet,
but here it is again, what he says
in both places about Su's poems
taking shape like water
from all it encounters. His poems
weave together the empirical world
and wandering thought.
I
will finish
this, staying with it, in a minute,
but what is foremost on my mind here
is this poem from my old friend Lee,
After you're gone, we have you here,
Lee Bassett, masked as a bibliophile
in Seattle, a monk, the abbot?
from Bright Insight Monastery
traveler of Tokaido Road with Ed Cain,
painter and heaven walker,
and though I've known Lee
for decades, I didn't know this,
his Tokaido Road, until, wandering
off road myself, I saw the prints
in the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh
while running down photos of One Shot
Teenie Harris, and his images of black service men
and their families, that's Joe Louis!
this when I was walking Hill District
looking for clues to August Wilson,
clues I found by the way! Oh!
Snow Tracks! This, of course,
I find in his poem. Lee Bassett
is a rivers and mountains poet,
and not only that, Bassett and Su,
both sitting poets! sometimes
to the detriment of their own health!
Sometime I have to stop them.
Who is talking here, which one.
I thought I was looking for Burton Watson's
line here, but I was wrong again--
this one in Hinton:
and tomorrow morning,
long after we've set out again for the day,
he'll still be here
among the white clouds of this poem on the wall
Watson and Bassett and Hinton and East Side Su
I didn't see any of this coming
Here's my old wife back from the store, ah Vieja,
Su never needs the last word, Hinton says,
I smile remembering us young
how long it takes to know a poem!
Wild thoughts, wild thoughts,
no, wild nights, wild nights,
because each gesture
in the poem is wild
Don't rattle the kids trying for clever
turn the ruin to compost and wonder
holding us closer than any flower
Jim Bodeen
10-11 September 2018
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