DEEP REMOTE COLD CAMP

DEEP REMOTE COLD CAMP

Three weeks after night

cabin-blessing, Man-wrapped warm

dreaming butterscotch chair.

Jim Bodeen

15-21 February 2020

Letter to Muriel Rukeyser from High Camp

LETTER TO MURIEL RUKEYSER FROM HIGH CAMP LODGE

ELEVATION 6000', WHITE PASS, GOAT ROCKS WILDERNESS

They call these Blue Bird days out West.

Sunshine, groomed ski runs, Monday.

No people. I'm shelling peanuts for Camp Robbers,

winter feathered birds flying to one's ski poles

before taking the nut from fingers

to delight even solitaries on the mountain--

a solitary day for me. High Camp's

one of my temples. I've been skiing out back

and into the Goat Rocks until breaking for lunch.

How to tell you what's happened in our country.

This day started out at Courthouse

where we received witness training

for asylum seekers behind deported.

I'm remembering your witness at prison gates

in Korea, the poet in solitary. My introduction

to you, The Gates, gift from a friend.

Your small steps. An infant beginning to run.

Your poems in my backpack some 25 years now.

This time the camps are ours. May your poems

strengthen our will to close them. Deportation flights

land at the airport five minutes from my house.

The longing, anhelo in Spanish, empathy

in your way of walking: to yearn,

in your footsteps. Yakima

Immigration Response Network:

(YIRN). Accompaniment way.

Besides my notebook, I've brought

your lovely Book of the Dead,

you never held this posthumous book

Catherine Venable Moore wrote

the introduction …following the Rukeyser map

becoming a tourist in my own home.

Upstairs in the loft at High Camp

reading Praise of the Committee

thinking maybe I volunteered here,

These are the lines on which a committee is formed,

maybe, I too have served, complicit,

Almost as soon as work was begun

in the tunnel men began to die among dry drills.

Here, Mearle Blankenship's testimony.

Rukeyser: These men breathe hard

but the committee has a voice of steel.

Sausage and provolone cheese on crackers.

I'm listening to the voice of Blankenship

on the chair lift. Sun is out.

It's cold. Snow so dry, its powder

lifts into air until it's invisible, diamond dust,

silica in a miner's lungs

building Highway One.

Jim Bodeen

12 February 2020

Take This Cinnamon Roll

TAKE THIS CINNAMON ROLL

Break this raisin-filled sweet bread

behind the chain-linked barbed-wire fence

in the spirit in which it was baked for you

in the oven of empathetic hope.

Faith is not an argument.

We have been separated by those

who have written the law.

This incomplete meal

will be remembered

as the sorrow of the morning.

Jim Bodeen

11 February 2020

CURTAIN CARDS

SHOWER CURTAIN CARDS

BEGIN a new line in witness

for those attending weekly ICE

flights out of Yakima. Weather

this morning, warm, no wind,

while six gathered behind

the Shower Curtain turned Sign

while chained asylum seekers

board Swift Air's weekly

Deportation Flight. Flower

blossoms embroidered on cloth

might be military insignia's

on hats of officers. Here,

The Temple of the Yellow Rectangle

and Chain-link Fence, one witness

calls them God Spot Threads,

Flowers of Trembling Beauty

confronting all that refuses to be disappeared.

Jim Bodeen

11 February 2020

           

FLIGHT #50

ICE FLIGHT #50 INTO YAKIMA

Sun is out, coats unzipped, snow melted

and gone, gloves off, ah but for the running

of generators by airport staff

in their attempt to make witness

uncomfortable. Are they bothered

themselves? one wonders. This work,

telling people they're not alone,

No Está Solo, is so easy,

and the intimacy, the intimacy.

Jim Bodeen

February 11, 2020

Phyllis at 102

PHYLLIS AT 102

I lived with you

and your husband

in 1964. You were

46 years old.

You were beautiful then, too.

Love ya, Jim
13 February 2020