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