LETTER TO JOY HARJO
LISTENING FROM MY BICYCLE
She had some horses, she did.
She had some horses.
It's the order here, and how.
The how and the beauty that goes beyond.
The horse and the rabbit.
The rabbit's been with me for some time
and I have a friend, Jane,
who's a potter and shapes them
making mischief in her hands
before taking them from the kiln.
I've been with these rabbits
and yours, too, and when the rabbit
opened for me in your Holy Beings poems
Karen says, You've got to read that one
to Jane, and I did, on Facebook,
from the mothership
in Los Sueños campgrounds
on the outskirts of Santa Fe.
My friend, Jane, she has some rabbits.
The kitchen table can't be owned,
but I can still call it yours. You pick out
all songs for the juke box.
I'm riding the neighborhood now, listening.
Listening and riding backwards. On my bike.
How in the order of things saying thanks.
Poems in my backpack weren't opening
and they were good ones hand-picked
and we'd been on the road long enough
for me to demand of the book store,
Nourish me. That's how Holy Beings
came into my hands, carrying me
collected and dishevelled mothershipping me.
Back on my bicycle a timed release capsule--
from 85th Evac Hospital,
Qui Nhon, Binh Dinh Province
when T.C. Cannon was painting, writing poems
from the 101st Airborne same time
I didn't know him, know his paintings,
his poems now, from Heard Museum,
didn't know you two were classmates
in Santa Fe, don't know about the time,
don't know that, I love the story of that school
your school, I found a street school
that took me when I came home,
taught there being taught
my jeweler taught me how Fritz Scholder
did it, the how of it, and now, on this bicycle,
in the development, I'm not dead either,
I'm good, last week your voice at Cornell
so good with those students, so good,
listening, reading, hearing/seeing that
the day before Crazy Brave arrives
from interlibrary loan and I sit with you
start to finish, rabbit's feeling important,
and the clay man's not stopping,
and you put it all in Crazy Brave
and I'm so glad you're in a band
mixing song and poem and voice,
all these lost tracks in the neighborhood
and that poem of yours on the kitchen table,
that's a poem that brings its own drum.
This is the bicycle in West Valley.
Yakima, from Yakama, Washington State.
This is your book of poems,
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.
playing with Coltrane in Oklahoma,
I'm a North Dakota boy whistle-
walking railroad tracks--
a kitchen table grandpa.
You can name the poets who aren't poets.
You're reading at Cornell
and then you're Crazy Brave
and now you're singing to me
in West Valley as I circle houses,
circling with your songs,
what a school, what a band.
Horses for teachers.
I'm sanding a salvaged cherry wood board
with a live edge,
making an altar for river stones,
remembering you remembering
the woman making decisions
keeping her
on the 13th floor.
Jim Bodeen
17 May 2019
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