Time with the Immortals

HIGH CAMP

      --Contemplation, too!

            Van Morrison

My old teacher, wondering about Keats,

asks for a hint. He's re-calling Spots of Time

for his daughter. I write from High Camp,

6000 feet in the Cascades, empty midweek,

except for Ski Patrol, kitchen workers.

Keats walks through Scotland, dreaming,

sleeping on benches with dirty blankets,

a sore throat, becoming immortal

in his 1000 days--Shelley's Adonais

raising him, Beautiful Lord. Sun

shines on my notebook, each mountain

a star for mortals--where Keats says,

I live in the eye. Book before me

at lunch: Czeslaw Milosz's Witness of Poetry:

Poetry intensifies what is present but veiled,

pulled from my shelf carried in backpack,

surprise choice chancing rebuke,

perhaps inspiration, on a cloudless day

after 5-day winter storm. Milosz

remembers Jan Kochinowski,

Poland's first great poet, complaining

for Cassandra, Why this torture--

Who when thou lent'st me power of prophecy,

Gav'st to my words no weight! My spirit

friend, Lars, feeds chickens

with world's left-over food!

Snow beauty covers Cassandra

with 500-year old verse--wounds

reaching back to Kochinowski,

forward to food-drunk and sated people

dumpster-stuffing what they can't consume.

Back on skis after soup, I turn

and duck under the boundary rope

into the wild--looking, not into mountains

offering glory, but to sublime

pristine cover of snow silence.

Skis maintain me where I could not

but sink. The old professor cautions,

half-created, half-perceived, Wordsworth

too, out of bounds with the immortals.

Jim Bodeen

8 February 2019