HOW THE ARTIST SEES IT ON WINTER SOLSTICE

 




AFTER A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN BY KATE PAPPAS

 

In your image we’re coming from the dark,

It’s Solstice, early, we’re pulling out

In the Mothership, picking up your cousin, Josh.

Your IPhone turned back on us, your eyes

Clear, foreground of all that’s behind you,

Artist already. This image, practiced,

Part of your practice. The artist’s eye.

Grandpa all shadow, visible only through

The light in your eyes. Two framed copies.

One for me in my studio. One for you,

So that you’ll know: This is you.

A reminder how you see the world.

How to shape things by your own light.

            Gpa

            21-28 December 2020

CHEQUES EN BLANCO

CHEQUES EN BLANCO

First words of morning

White people reading poems

Asylum in fog


Jim Bodeen

16 December 2020

MUSIC FOR ALL YOUR VOWS BEGINNING, BEGINNING

 

MUSIC FOR ALL YOUR VOWS

 

This is a Michaeltree

This is music for all your vows

Coltrane in the living room

Coltrane in paint from the Colorist

Coltrane from the hands of Brother Rex Deloney

Reed in his mouth music

Brushing, brushing, the brushing

From his hands the brush

For all your vows

Landscape legacy ligature

Ligament itself horn in mouth

 

Still, still,

 

Quiet body still standup

 

Breaking, breaking—caballero andante—

Breaking into sound breaking—break again!

Silent turn it up turn it up

This music before you

This breath-moment vibration

Music for all your vows

 

Jim Bodeen

17 December 2020

MUSIC FOR ALL YOUR VOWS

 

THE UNTITLED TEN

 

Music for All Your Vows

There is only this one

Voto, promesa, juramento

Oath, sacrament, suffrage

 

The library is a hospital

I’ll take those two songs with me

Is this a private room

There is only one song not two

But you said

Music for all your vows

 

Listen

This has nothing

Nothing to do

With marriage or elections

 

Jim Bodeen

16 December 2020

DEARTH OF NEWS AT CHRISTMAS

DEARTH OF NEWS AT CHRISTMAS

 

It’s all over town, Ray Charles

Sings, the news is out

And I’ve been told

My vote was counted.

Rumors say Han Shan

Made an appearance

In Alaska. But Brenda,

Tell me what happened

At the Chess tournament.

Is he like this around the house?

Jim

14 December 2020

Suite for James Weldon Johnson

 


A SUITE FOR JAMES WELDON JOHNSON
SUMMER AND FALL, 2020

 

 

There is a wide, wide wonder in it all…

James Weldon Johnson

 

—But…beautiful, like kissed tears, she said…

But if I could tell you, you’d listen?

Geoff Dyer

*

FROM TUESDAY TO TUESDAY, NOVEMBER, 2020,

AND FROM SUNDAY TO SUNDAY, TOO,

FROM THE WRITINGS OF JAMES WELDON JOHNSON,

BY WAY OF ACKNOWLEDGING HIS WAVING FORWARD WORD

 

And for poets from Phyllis Wheatley to Joshua Henry Jones, Jr.,

All included in The Book of American Negro Poetry,

Edited by James Weldon Johnson, 1922

 *

Six feet from Woodrow Wilson,

James Weldon Johnson, a portrait study

Looking for awareness, Looking

For traces of Corporal Baltimore,

 

Social distancing we’d call it, today,

Our pandemic-plague-time veiled.

Along this way, but beautiful.

Lift every voice, and sing—

 

You and your brother riffing

Anecdotes. Anonymous.

Entering the culture from this

Side to save one’s own skin—

 

Aframerican hope. This, the laundry

Bag where I keep my notebook

In the Pullman car, my artist-friend’s

Dad with his eye-out on the dream

 

Train. So many anthologies now,

Thick, burdensome, I count three essential:

Yours from 1922, Bontemps’ American Negro Poetry,

1963—and one come later, in-between,

 

Michael Harper’s—Michaeltree Songline

Pedigree family-blues poet’s 200 Years—

Vision, struggle, power, beauty & triumph,

With Anthony Walton. Quatrains full

 

With digression, errantry, broken away,

Pull of Black poets, follow-me-prophetic

Jesus-like. From origins, soul-making.

Walkabout like this. Your anthology first,

 

But I came of age (coming home from war),

Finding you inside Bontemps’ who opens

His books with you: O Black and Unknown Bards:

How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?

 

‘Wide wonder in it all’—alongside

Go Down Death (A Funeral Sermon)—

Death didn’t frighten Sister Caroline

Bontemps (along with music) would carry,

 

Direct me, over four decades.

Your inclusion of Paul Lawrence Dunbar,

Jump back, honey, jump back.—poor

Was the loan—go forth, Claude McKay says,

 

Black of that Black land where black deeds are done—

Anne Spencer, now on a new American stamp,

a quivering female thing/gesturing assignations

And young Fenton Johnson’s Children of the Sun—

 

Weaving, waiting, reared, embossed—in splendor—

His nouns and verbs living still under your cover.

Mine, a thank you crossing 100 years of living poems.

Hand carried from Johnson, Harper, Bontemps,

 

Breathing, turning poisoned air to oxygen.

Your book carried us, lifted us, like the hymn

You and your brother J. Rosamond Johnson

Created from anecdote, pressured by time.

 

*

WHEN I WAS NO LONGER WHO I WAS

 

            1 September 1961—Moore Theater—Seattle

                        RAY CHARLES

 

I got my driver’s license the day

I turned 16 on the 9th of August—

But I wasn’t at the Moore—I found

The Eagles Ballroom at 7th and Union

The night before—

It was a dance, a dance hall, and I was all eyes—     

Knowing about it before I knew what it was

The only living boy from Dakota in the room

Unsure of the clutch in my father’s Plymouth

Never having been alone on Seattle’s

Downtown streets stopped

At a red light pointed at the moon

I wouldn’t know it then

Did I see the song or hear it

What’d I say I wouldn’t

Know it but I had found it

—this  way—

And found myself in the song

And the song was a poem

And you don’t know me

Poem and song the same thing

And it would be enough and deeper

And more true and coming from proof

In my scrapbooks precursors

It brings a tear clutch and double clutch

Careless love you don’t know the one

And what was so clear

And laid out before me would never

Veer this straight swing home

30 November—7 December 2020

*

THE SINGING CARPENTER

      for the students of A.C. Davis High School

                And the children of Pastor Everhart

   Baptist preacher who lifted us

    My voice and yours,

    Pastor John Edward Everhart, 79,

    Yakima, where he sang to us each year

    During Black History Month

    Transitioned to the welcoming arms

    Of the Lord our God on March 28, 2020.

 

We’d take our classes to the auditorium

Where he was backed by angels—

The Aeolian Choir and he’d talk to us,

Tell us his story, tell us

How it was—he finished

High school in the army—

Chaplain’s assistant, 20 —

Served in Vietnam—we

Never talked about it—and

How it is, too—he’d be preaching

To us, really, Texas born,

Married in North Carolina,

And then, my God! How

He did it, he’d be right there

In between talk and song

Maybe the change in mid-word,

Harmonies—by the time he hit

Liberty it was there,

High as the listening skies, 

The Aeolians would kick in,

Beckoning with their arms,

More than two decades

We did this, there was a piano

Too, where would it come from,

And drums, Full of the faith,

Full of the hope, and we

Wouldn’t get every word

But carried by students next to us

Even in the balcony, where the air

Was thin, everybody singing—

Thy hand true, true to our native land

He came from Mt. Hope,

He came from Pilgrim’s Rest,

He came to us all of us

Young and young again

In the public city school

Where his children

Would hear their father sing

20 November 2020

*

—BUT BEFORE THEN,

a poor town boy

from the country of wheat fields

closer to Canada

than the United States of America

his parents left the wheat fields

and the grain elevator

staying close to railroad tracks

to the West Coast and city life

 

the time of Elvis Presley

he’s carrying newspapers

a 14-year old paper boy

on his bicycle—it’s as simple

as this—he hears

the music of Ray Charles

 

Before they left the country

He listened to baseball game

With his mother

In the farm kitchen

From baseball cards

He knew Mickey Mantle

And Willie Mays

He knew what was happening

From these cards

He knew Elston Howard

*

THE NFL FOOTBALL GAME

LINKING TULSA TO RAY CHARLES

AND THE CONVERSATIONS WITH GIL CHANDLER

CONFIRMING THE TIME

 

Gil and I out back

On patio chairs with coffee

Both with books, Baldwin

Biography in my hands

And Tulsa massacre in his—

One of us, must’ve been Gilbert,

Brings up Ray Charles—

Tulsa with 10,000 homeless

Hundreds killed in Greenwood District

Memorial Day, 1921, how

Talk turned to Seattle Labor Day

Black Wall Street don’t have a clue—

Gil talking about Eagles Ballroom,

Ray Charles, Eagles Ball Room, Seattle,

Around in the alley a door

Two stairs, my cousin and I

Would stand around the door

Push on door trip that lock

One go one way one go the other

 

We eat lunch under the big Maple

Autumn Blaze, I ask Gil to say Grace

He gives his Daddy’s prayer

The divine love has met

And always will meet

For every human need

Which we are truly grateful for, Amen

Gil says he said it every day,

His father, Ben Chandler

 

Back and forth all morning

The Negro Alamo and Ray Charles

Somehow remembering he says,

Seattle, 1959—No, no, I say,

Couldn’t have been

I was only 14 then and I was there too

Just 16 by days, a kind of terror

In memory’s timeline

 

Look it up

Cleveland Browns and San Francisco 49ers

Are in Portland for an exhibition game

And I came up to see Ray Charles

There it is I find it months later

August 25, 1962, Browns win 34-27

I am in that Ballroom Gil

 

We’re in there together,

That sound coming from that voice

The Raylettes I knew something new

In me forever that night

You were there and we wouldn’t meet

For nearly forty years

You taking me into the ancestors

In Old Yakima when I come back

From Detroit I’m 16 by days

You’re 22

Jim

22 July—8 December 2020

*

Where the bright gleam of our bright star is cast—

This, that day of collapsing distance

With President Wilson—Fighting

Southern oligarchy, for national citizenship

 

With deep distrust of Wilson in 1916.

1917 comes to East St. Louis and Houston.

Speaking to Wilson against shooting

And lynching, after writing about the baby

 

Baptized in gasoline, who has a word

For you, elected NAACP Secretary

Standing to speak? 13 new NAACP

Branches, 1917 horrors destroying

 

What can be remembered in time.

Corporal Charles Baltimore of the 24th Infantry

Going to check on Alonso Edwards,

Black soldier who was pistol-whipped

 

And arrested, after coming to the rescue

Of a Black woman pulled into the street

In her nightgown while her five children watch.

Leader of 10,000 people Silent March--

 

Newspapers show and tell of the lynching

And Private Frank Johnson breaking into gospel,

Lord, I’m coming home, 12 other soldiers joined

In song. In East St. Louis, white mobs massacre

 

Blacks protesting black workers from the South

Taking industrial jobs from them. 27 murders found,

Houses, bodies, neighborhood burned—this is the news

On the 4th of July, 1917. Jim Crow Justice.

*

We come as a delegation from the New York Branch

Of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,

Johnson says to President Wilson, standing, And now,

Mr. President, we would not let this opportunity pass…

 *

100 YEARS OF A SOUL-MAKING CHAIN

                For B.G, exhortation, & the critical moment

Three anthologies

Linking each other threaded

Dark duende matter

 

Sounding soul singing

Johnson-Harper-Bontemps

Dry paper ink breath

 

1917

Soldiers in East St. Louis

Six feet chain-distanced

 

A murmuration

Confuse predators, stay warm

Dry streams declaring

 Jim

 *

The Book of American Negro Poetry

Come to us in a mean time—1922—

1922—Thanking you at Thanksgiving,

Mr. Johnson, 100 years later. You’ve been

 

Working with NAACP and Congress

For three years on the Anti-Lynching Bill,

The Dyer bill, finally passed by House

In 1922—Senators will filibuster,

 

But the poems, still in print—

I’m reading now A Song of Thanks,

By Edward Smyth Jones,

For the pumpkin sweet and the yellow yam

 

For the corn and beans and the sugared ham—

Jones lives too in the Index of Authors, telling

How he walked 100s of miles from the South

To Harvard, arrested for vagrancy. His poem,

 

Harvard Square gets him out of jail. So it is,

With poems, Mr. Johnson, this book in my hands.

The anti-lynching bill will be looked at again.

It, too, well, another poem, George Marion McClellon’s

 

Feet of Judas, reminds, Christ washed Judas’ feet.

Some things you don’t know about your work:

Library of America, 2004, your work, 1000 pages,

Paper like silk, bound on boards, wrapped in cloth,

 

Richly maroon, and boxed, matching sewn ribbon

For marking pages. But beautiful. If I underline?

If I write in margins, I deface a treasure. You write

On page 615 when Jack Johnson defeats Jeffries.

 *

NOT UNTIL I’M 75 YEARS OLD DO I READ

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLORED MAN

IN A SINGLE AFTERNOON, TELLING MY WIFE AT DINNER,

Karen, I’ve known about this book since high school,

But never read it. Listen. I take notes from first sentence,

...in writing the following pages I am divulging

The great secret of my life. The second paragraph

 

Reveals the regret in the book’s last paragraph.

Of course I read it next. Beginning again, his mother’s

Arms hold him, he becomes a solitary. He turns in

The wrong notebook in school…a book that cleared

 

The whole mystery…and who is this father? She’ll…

Someday…—and while I’m reading,

           

            My brother calls, He’s just seen

            This movie, a message of hope,

            David Byrnes’ American Utopia,

            Every song better than the last,

            If you need hope, especially

            The last one, a protest,

            Say her name

            Say his name

            Spike Lee directs

            We’re burning down the house

            Byrnes says and this

            This is a connection

            To the other side.

            It’s a young singer,

                              Janelle Monáe

            Hell you, Talmbaud,

            Her chant, chanting

            Names of Black Americans

            Killed by police and vigilantes,

            From 2015—anthemic—your tocaya

            In our time—Wondaland arts, Afro

            Futurist, asking listeners to record

            Personal versions—Say her name—

            Tagline on truth—voices cracking

            The popping sounds

of technology and pistol

 

  He added,

‘of course, you could go any place in the city,

 

they wouldn’t know you from white.’

Our author Learning language rolling cigars

Learning to speak by speaking.

Where vocabulary comes from.

 

One day his mother called him home.

This is your father. He promises a gift.

It’s a piano and you’ll never see him again.

But now you can talk to your mother,

 

And like Baldwin, you’ll get to Paris.

You’ll sit in a theatre watching Faust

Looking at a woman, imagining.

She’s young, beautiful, with her parents,

 

You’re there by accident looking

At her father, seeing, now, he’s yours’,

Too, this man you’ve seen once in your life.

Nothing is acknowledged.--

 

Another friend calls

Reading Yeats—

Turn to The Tower,

Last section, beginning,

Now I shall make my soul…

Yeats is an old man

My friend tightens down the poem

Like he did with Williams’

Red Wheelbarrow

Deleting ‘so much depends’

Now only this

Now I shall make my soul

However you make it

Repeating again, however

 

                        I would tell Karen

The story of the reading of this book

Reading it as James Weldon Johnson’s

Autobiography, misreading, because

 

I’d not known—published anonymously,

I’d not read enough—and I’d wake her

That night in bed, saying, I had it wrong,

The I in the story, it wasn’t Johnson,

           

It’s a book of fiction. Published that way.

And I got pulled in. Oh, man. This book.

Johnson knows the slave songs. It shows

In every piece of his work—James Weldon Johnson.

 

*

PLAY IT FORWARD, PLAY IT BACK,

FURTHERANCE—THIS LETTER,

DEAR MR. JAMES WELDON JOHNSON,

% OF WRITINGS, LIBRARY OF AMERICA

 

Your editorials from The New York Age:

Do You Read Negro Papers?

President Wilson’s “New Freedom” and the Negro,

Calibre Statesmen, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

 

And the Clansman, The Passing of Jack Johnson,

A Trap, “The Poor White Musician”,

Stranger Than Fiction, Saluting the Flag,

Responsibilities and Opportunities

 

Of the Colored Ministry, Under the Dome of the Capitol,

The Silent Parade, An Army with Banners,

Experienced Men Wanted, “Why Should a Negro Fight?”,

“Negro” With a Big “N”, Protesting Women and the War,

 

The Japanese Question in California,

The “Jim Crow” Car in Congress,

A Real Poet—Mr. Johnson, I’m stopping

Here—but beautiful--…there are, of course,…

 

Great poets that blaze out brightest…

These four great religious leaders…

All great ethical poets…Buddha,

Confucius, Christ and Mohammed…

 

Peaks of …genius of the races

That produced them…limited to

Oriental races. America

And the 2020 elections. I’m here,

 

Now. Me, thanking you for NAACP,

America has been saved by Black voters again.

A President whose name, We cannot say,

Has been ousted. Van Jones, Black voice,

 

It’s easier to be a parent this morning,

Kamala Harris, Howard University,

Dressed in a 2-piece pant suit,

Cream-colored blouse, our Vice-President—

 

Lift every voice and sing.

We’re singing, Mr. Johnson,

Just after Thanksgiving, we’re singing

In the midst of a new plague,

 

Singing through a poisonous time.

Walter Mosley, mystery writer, Black,

Receiving the national award for

We, the people, who are darker than blue,

 

I write you from Yakima, Washington,

Authenticated by Black writers, reading Cervantes,

almost done, this last redeeming note:

unnamed President protesting Detroit votes

 

that threw him out, files lawsuit.

NAACP Legal Defense Fund files

Federal lawsuit on behalf of Michigan

Voters, accusing him of violating

 

Voting Rights Act. Sherrilyn Ifill,

President and Director, Counsel of NAACP

Legal Defense Fund—cousin of Gwen Ifill,

(now with you), living on the page

 

And a new Commemorative Stamp,

The one on this letter, hand-cancelled,

Connects directly to you through one

Thurgood Marshall. I’m writing

 

From bed, after waking Karen,

My wife, to tell her about this lawsuit.

It’s Come Sunday here, Sunday Morning,

It’s dark, but the morning, and your words,

 

POST SCRIPT—BUT BEAUTIFUL

Access and other sources: Gilbert Chandler, Geoff Dyer,

 Jim Bodeen

29 November 2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Kiss for Rocinante

 

30 DECEMBER 2020

 

With the word of the year

Already picked

And 30 days to go,

 

We can

Kind of move

On, coffee dripping

 

Into a glass jar,

Don Quixote hanging

From a hay loft

 

Standing on Rocinante

Don’t kiss me on the mouth

I’m taken,

 

Rocinante doesn’t move

For hours until a filly

Arrives, and the smell

 

Even better than coffee

When she kisses him

He moves—El Caballero Andante—

 

His feet can’t quite

Touch the ground

Everything coming

 

Together, the enchanted inn,

I tell Karen, this is happening

While I pour her coffee

 

Jim Bodeen

1 December 2020

—BUT BEFORE THEN,

 

—BUT BEFORE THEN,

 

a poor town boy

from the country of wheat fields

closer to Canada

than the United States of America

his parents left the wheat fields

and the grain elevator

staying close to railroad tracks

to the West Coast and city life

 

the time of Elvis Presley

he’s carrying newspapers

a 14-year old paper boy

on his bicycle—it’s as simple

as this—he hears

the music of Ray Charles

 

Before they left the country

He listened to baseball game

With his mother

In the farm kitchen

From baseball cards

He knew Mickey Mantle

And Willie Mays

He knew what was happening

From these cards

He knew Elston Howard

 Jim Bodeen

1 December 2020

 

Reading Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man at 75

 

NOT UNTIL I’M 75 YEARS OLD DO I READ

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLORED MAN

IN A SINGLE AFTERNOON, TELLING MY WIFE AT DINNER,

 

Karen, I’ve known about this book since high school,

But never read it. Listen. I take notes from first sentence,

...in writing the following pages I am divulging

The great secret of my life. The second paragraph

 

Reveals the regret in the book’s last paragraph.

Of course I read it next. Beginning again, his mother’s

Arms hold him, he becomes a solitary. He turns in

The wrong notebook in school…a book that cleared

 

The whole mystery…and who is this father? She’ll…

Someday…—and while I’m reading,

           

            My brother calls, He’s just seen

            This movie, a message of hope,

            David Byrnes’ American Utopia,

            Every song better than the last,

            If you need hope, especially

            The last one, a protest,

            Say her name

            Say his name

            Spike Lee directs

            We’re burning down the house

            Byrnes says and this

            This is a connection

            To the other side.

                                       

  He added,

‘of course, you could go in any place in the city,

 

they wouldn’t know you from white.’

Our author Learning language rolling cigars

Learning to speak by speaking.

Where vocabulary comes from.

 

One day his mother called him home.

This is your father. He promises a gift.

It’s a piano and you’ll never see him again.

But now you can talk to your mother,

 

And like Baldwin, you’ll get to Paris.

You’ll sit in a theatre watching Faust

Looking at a woman, imagining.

She’s young, beautiful, with her parents,

 

You’re there by accident looking

At her father, seeing, now, he’s yours’,

Too, this man you’ve seen once in your life.

Nothing is acknowledged.--

 

Another friend calls

Reading Yeats—

Turn to The Tower,

Last section, beginning,

Now I shall make my soul…

Yeats is an old man

My friend tightens down the poem

Like he did with Williams’

Red Wheelbarrow

Deleting ‘so much depends’

Now only this

Now I shall make my soul

However you make it

Repeating again, however

 

                        I would tell Karen

The story of the reading of this book

Reading it as James Weldon Johnson’s

Autobiography, misreading, because

 

I’d not known—published anonymously,

I’d not read enough—and I’d wake her

That night in bed, saying, I had it wrong,

The I in the story, it wasn’t Johnson,

           

It’s a book of fiction. Published that way.

And I got pulled in. Oh, man. This book.

Johnson knows the slave songs. It shows

In every piece of his work.

 

27 November 2020

Lift Every Voice and Sing: A Reading of James Weldon Johnson's poem


A Reading of James Weldon Johnson's Lift Every Voice,
the beloved African American hymn
also known as the African American National Anthem.

OATMEAL AFTER THANKSGIVING

 

OATMEAL WITH GOLDEN DELICIOUS APPLES

AND BROWN SUGAR AFTER THANKSGIVING

QUARANTINED OATMEAL IN FIRED GLASS BOWLS

 

Oatmeal with Karen

Saigon Cinnamon Oatmeal

Toasted bittersweet

 

Jim Bodeen

28 November 2020

The Singing Carpenter

 

THE SINGING CARPENTER

 

            for the students of A.C. Davis High School

                And the children of Pastor Everhart

 

    Baptist preacher who lifted my voice

    Pastor John Edward Everhart, 79,

    Yakima, where he sang to us each year

    During Black History Month

    transitioned to the welcoming arms

    of the Lord our God on March 28, 2020.

 

We’d take our classes to the auditorium

Where he was backed by angels—

The Aeolian Choir and he’s talk to us,

Tell us his story, tell us

How it was—he finished

High school in the army—

Chaplain’s assistant, 20 —

Served in Vietnam—we

Never talked about it—and

How it is, too—he’d be preaching

To us, really, Texas born,

Married in North Carolina,

And then, my God! How

He did it, he’d be right there

In between talk and song

Maybe the change in mid-word,

Harmonies—by the time he hit

Liberty it was there,

High as the listening skies,  

The Aeolians would kick in,

Beckoning with their arms,

More than two decades

We did this, there was a piano

Too, where would it come from,

And drums, Full of the faith,

Full of the hope, and we

Wouldn’t get every word

But carried by students next to us

Even in the balcony, where the air

Was thin, everybody singing—

Thy hand true, true to our native land

He came from Mt. Hope,

He came from Pilgrim’s Rest,

He came to us all of us

Young and young again

In the public city school

Where his children

Would hear their father sing

 

Jim Bodeen

20 November 2020

 

 

THE UNIFORM I WARE

 

THE UNIFORM I WARE

 

She said, you look so young in the photo.

I was the Evac man at the 85th Evac Hospital.

I don’t know how I got that hat.

It wasn’t like the others.

It helped me. It has its own story.

 

The mustache also.

It wasn’t uniform.

 

Two full colonels fought over it.

 

Not army issue, Sergeant.

Out of uniform, GI.

Not below the lip

Or the corners of the mouth.

 

You will not cut that mustache,

Sgt Bodeen, the other one said,

Chief of Surgery, giving me

Bone wax to stop bleeding in bones.

Twist the whiskers towards the eyes,

Let it grow.


I was 22. Turned 23 in Vietnam.


The hippie medic said,

Give me that hat.

Sgt Pepper album just out.

It was Tet, 1968.

I rolled my sleeves

Above my stripes, rank hidden.

I was never uniform.

When my hat came back

Spray-painted army orange

It was a frozen sculpture,

Wrinkled and cocked,

Hung on a painted rainbow,

Sgt. Bodeen, This Way Home,

A hat given by mistake,

One I still ware, mine.

 

Jim Bodeen

16 November 2020




Quatrain for Patsy

 

QUATRAIN FOR PATSY

 

Sorrow everywhere

When Sancho gave his master the title

Knight of the Sorrowful Face[i],

Don Quixote embraced it.

 

Jim Bodeen

11 November 2020



[i] Edith Grossman translation. Cervantes: el Caballero de la Triste Figura, Don Quijote de la Mancha, capitulo XIX.

IT'S EASIER FOR ME

 



IT’S EASIER FOR ME

   It’s easier being a parent this morning.

            Van Jones to Anderson Cooper

It is.

It is easier.

Easier being me.

Easier.

Easier saying it like this.

It’s easier to tell your kid.

Walking around the block is easier.

Opening the front door.

Bok choy, green onions, garlic.

Kitchen with fresh ginger.

Blue hope in a guitar string.

I had my say listening

A case for a whole lot of people.

I just want my sons to look.

Me, too.

Jim Bodeen

10 November 2020

 

AFTER THE SINGING, THE FOLLOWING MORNING

 










AFTER THE SINGING THE FOLLOWING

 morning, in the living room

coffee and newspaper with Karen

small talk thank God

attempting routine absent

of wonder still the sewing

machine new smarter

than cars that steer

when the bobbin runs out, oil

and already so much lint

working with flannel

it will be worse but Biden

did promise to stop deportation

flights immediately when

did he say that two days

ago I think a woman columnist

says we’re a center right

nation a pastor knows how

they voted carry your Bible

in one hand a newspaper

in the other Gray’s Anatomy

starts Thursday a long

time coming Mammoth

mountain with seven

inches of new snow



Jim Bodeen

8 November 2020

                                                 

BELATED THANK YOU LETTER TO W.E.B. DUBOIS

 

BELATED THANK YOU LETTER TO W.E.B. DUBOIS

WHILE READING THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA EDITION,  DUBOIS: WRITINGS,

THE  SUPPRESSION OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE,

THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, DUSK OF DAWN & ESSAYS,

AFTER 25 MAY 2020[i], AND THROUGH SUMMER AND FALL OF 2020

High in the tower where I sit above the loud complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, none there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk. Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them…Not as a foreigner do I come, for I am native…I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know.

            W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of White Folk, Darkwater, 1920

Leaving, then, the world of the white man, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses,--the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls…Before each chapter…stands a bar of the Sorrow Songs,--some echo of haunting melody from the only American music which welled up from black souls in the dark past. And, finally, need I add that I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil?

            W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, Atlanta, Ga., Feb 1, 1903

Dear Dr. DuBois,

Anne Spencer’s on the new Harlem Renaissance stamp! I don’t need to be stepping on flowers in her garden at the reception, but can’t stop imagining the look on your face receiving the mail with her smile on the envelope. I’d love to find a photo of you from her writing cottage, Edankraal, listening to her poems. The price of stamps has gone up. You’re on two already. The Postal Service issued a 29-cent DuBois stamp in 1992 as part of its Black Heritage Series; and again in 1997, unveiling, (their word, they know not what they say) a 32-cent stamp honoring you as a civil rights pioneer. You’re sitting with your typewriter. You never went empty. Thank you for every word. Commemorative Stamps inspire, Dr. DuBois, but my hope in this letter is to say something of what Souls of Black Folk has meant to me over the past 50 years (I’m 75), and not write about stamps, wonderful as they are, and now here I am standing before the Post Office—O!—

 Dr. DuBois, we’re in such a—


    Nothing’s unveiled. Nothing. The veil.

    Republicans are pulling out sorting machines at the post office,

    Suppressing ballots not slavery, the election in six days.

    Mailing ballots clogged, grinds each woman and man.

    I used to teach, have a classroom.

    The fly. Souls of white folk.

    Atlanta and the 100 hills.

    Your chronology and the dizziness it brings.

    I didn’t want to talk about Washington,

    Your well-known prophesies.

    What, in God’s name, am I on earth for?[ii]

    Not Dudley Randall’s poem carrying me decades

    None of the indelible beauty.

    This is a war cry, warrior DuBois,

    And you are the word behind

    Black Lives Matter.

 *

If I had a classroom today,

all my students would you write letters.

We’d start with the post office, telling you everything.

They told us to get out with our masks.

The poem in the garden, the chronology From here.

A new saint your way. George Floyd, Look for him.

You taught us caste too. Isabel Wilkerson

Took off with it: Caste of Our Discontent.

Another of your words making a comeback.


In the Vice-Presidential Debate

Between Democratic Senator Kamala Harris

And Vice-President Mike Pence,

(Kamala graduated from Howard),

A fly lands on the Vice-President’s head

And he doesn’t brush it off.

Call this Parable of the Fly Reborn.

I am underlining again reading (Yes I am!)

Souls of Black Folk, and that fly

Kept us going for a week.

A little blue fly is trying to cross the yawning keyhole.

Oh Bishop Onderdonk![iii] You too live again!—thriving

In the well-tempered skin of Mike Pence. 

Shoo fly, shoe fly, feelers in his clipped protestant hair.

Have they all felt their Valley of Humiliation?

Your Alexander Crummell lives where he stands

Refusing entry under such terms.

Souls of Black Folk. But beautiful.

How laughter is food from Jesus.

 *

Your long walk, your steady resistance,

Warns against word count and remembrance,

Requiring a march and not a parade,

Your breath planting free schools,

Your pen insistent, praising Freedmen’s Bureau,

Naming Edmund Ware, Samuel Armstrong,

So much faith in men! Unwritten history.

This one, Dr. DuBois:

I taught school in the hills of Tennessee.

Out of Fisk, beginning the hunt for a school—

Got a teacher? Yes. So I walked on and on—

Horses were expensive. You found one.

You stayed in homes longing to know,

Knowing doubts of old folks.

Your two years in country schools

Makes Robert Moses[iv] possible,

Puts algebra alongside the vote.

 *

Sorrow songs rise above all defining prayer.

Most beautiful expression of human experience.

It takes courage to leave the porch

And if you want to ride with our teacher

            the Jim Crow door’s open.

 *

Born in 1868, you start high school in 1880,

Become a saint at 95, a citizen of Ghana. 

In 1963. I am 17, hearing your name for the first time.

Your Library of America writings count 1334 pages.

This letter. You’re not laughing in your essays,

But what on earth is whiteness that one should desire it?

Suppression returns. Your early call for suppression of slave trade.

Today it’s suppression of the vote and we follow you,

 And it shall mean the triumph

Of the good, the beautiful and the true.

 *

Two friends here, Gilbert and Phil[v] won’t let me close

With a handshake. Dr. Dubois, we’ve been socially distanced

By another plague, and give air-hugs and elbow bumps.

I’m reading about your grandson, Arthur McFarlane II.

He’s got his own Ph.D in public health.

I’m looking at the picture of the two of you.

You’re 90. He’s two months.

 *

Your birthday party in New York,

You’re guest of honor. Your grandson’s given your words,

You will soon learn, my dear young man…

That famous one addressed to you, ending,

Learn what you want to do, how you are fit to do it…

And Sharee Silerio lives with history, too,

Writes in THE Root how your grandson works

To re-distribute what’s here, with homelessness, food insecurity.

Here’s more. He knows your talented tenth.

…those ten were supposed to be of service to the people,

…that piece of the puzzle is what I’ve taken

As being my part keeping grandpa’s legacy alive.

I think that a big part of how I became myself.

People relate to his double consciousness,

to what grandpa says.

 *

Writing to grandkids. What else to do?

Your grandson finds his voice in you.

Children hand-carrying letters, walking.

 

Jim Bodeen

Storypath/Cuentocamino

Yakima, WA

October, 2020


[i] George Floyd is murdered in Minneapolis by a policeman on this day.

[ii] DuBois, citing Alexander Crummell, who refused the veil, writing in Souls of Black Folk.

[iii] See Chapter XII, Souls of Black Folk, Of Alexander Crummell.

[iv] Robert Moses went on to teach Algebra in the South, insisting on quality education for Black students.

[v] Gilbert Chandler & Phil Pleasant, Yakima. Chandler took me into Black Ancestors to document their stories. Phil was famous for neckbones and his mantra, Don’t give me no handshake!