*
Pool of fresh water
Underneath the bird feeder
Garden stone blossom
Jim Bodeen
24 May 2021
ONE CERTAIN STONE
ONE CERTAIN STONE
--for Lea Ramirez
We talked once of stones
and you remembered other
things I had forgotten
that had nothing
to do with stones.
So much like mountains
even in our hands
they carry news
of mountain majesty
in our pockets
how like tiny moments
in our lives
when they remind us
that time, that song,
that parable of Jesus
woman at the well
how often stone and water,
for instance,
and
As children
we remember singing,
the wise man
building his house
on the rock,
and especially for those
of us who’ve said
in more ways than one
how we love certain stones,
yes love them, we say,
because we don’t have
another word for them,
don’t we—each of us--
have a stone we can visit
when we’re left alone?
A stone where the beloved
will meet us
and we will be one.
Love,
Jim and Karen
SUITE FOR KEVIN YOUNG
TRIPTYCH FOR KEVIN YOUNG
I. ------------
...all your mother insists
we must see to know...
from Kevin Young’s Money Road
Robins in front yard, eastern morning
sunshine, mid-April, Juneberry Bush
blossoming. Walking into house,
wiping dew-wet shoes, into guest
bathroom where your Blues Poems,
lovely, rests on cabinet with Jody’s
True North in snow storm
also backed in blue. Jody, gone
now blues sustained lifted,
Dear Darkness, food celebrated
passing, giant steps all,
Kevin Young,
Dear Kevin,
This week you’re everywhere in this house,
David and Gil here this week for pork sandwiches
outside, outback, David’s wife gone after 51 years,
Detroit born, Vietnam Vet baseball hat,
(Being two years older, I’m two years earlier in Nam)
this is your lovely Art of Losing, my gift,
open first to Yusef’s Facing It
as we mirror each other. What’s so lovely
about Kevin Young’s work, the way
he breaks down boundaries,
We can talk about this.
We can talk about this because Gil’s
our listener-griot, soul historian.
He doesn’t flinch questioning,
Isn’t listening making love, Gil?
Isn’t listening, deepest penetration?
You’re everywhere in this house, Kevin Young.
This week’s New Yorker, new direction coming from
Nathaniel Mackey’s Song of the Andoumboulou
and I turn to Blue Light Sutras 1976-1989,
250 Years of African American struggle and song,
and in Falso Brilhante,
White sky made blue by the blackness,
Mackey setting out, singing all the songs.
Your singing tracks surround, Kevin Young,
your books placed carefully in each garden roof
providing sanctuary and shade from sun.
This morning your centerpiece essay.
Return to Blue Light Sutras, this time only women,
that kind of read, trying every way I can imagine
to enter the book. Start to finish, then, the women.
Soaring once more, struggle and song.
II. A. African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song:
Lift Every Voice: Why African American Poetry Matters
I’ve got a friend in Yakima, looks out for me.
Found Struggle and Song in the Independent book store, Inklings,
turned it around in the poetry session so nobody’d
find it until I got there. That first sit down with the book
in my hands. The solid fact of A Library of America
bound book, as close to a permanent thing
as the idea. That night with your essay
and amplification. The difficult miracle.
Title, epigraph. June Jordan. That word,
persist, hope-based political, a bumper sticker
on my car come from here:
This is the difficulty of black poetry in America:
that we persist, published or not, and loved or unloved:
we persist.
I read her poems in the Big book. Take these
as another starting point: What would I do white?
I would do nothing.
That would be enough.
Non-action to that extreme.
Supreme effort to get out of the way.
Through the great anthologies of my time.
Johnson, Bontemps, Harper,
some look, some teachers,
and the great need to find
that what I needed there,
and now, this morning, how I got here with you--
Struggle and Song. Big thanks.
The Big Book stepping us through time
and the back of forth, including the outside-of-it-all
time, unending, good night kiss without end,
after all this time, here. Here it is in the hands.
A 12-Step beauty for all things right and wrong.
Get to it, Man. Get to it.
This morning, 28 Days in February,
the anthologies carrying me
after the appearance of the Harlem Renaissance Stamps
last summer. Names I hadn’t integrated in my life.
Arthur Schomburg. The Schomburg Center,
Center for Research in Black Culture.
Your office. Office itself. Opus facere.
Divine service. Doing service work of the divine.
Power, might and abundance. To set.
What does your desk look like?
Divine office. Worship.
I write to friends who write:
Go to the Schomburg Center,
write notebook poems that take me there.
Schomburg’s teacher urges him on.
He turned her lessons around.
Do this for me. Then the panel appears
remembering Sterling Brown
and I’m listening to his granddaughter.
Poets know those eight categories
of time, Kevin Young,
are eight lines making an 8-line poem,
not categories at all, maybe
I can call them reading rooms.
Why this matters to me.
Struggle and song makes gratitude possible.
For the black poets
have shaped my life and fed me.
Saved me. Some days. Ray Charles.
Seattle. 1962. What’d I Say. Modern Sounds.
Not everybody messing around. Not me.
Made me. Yes. Well, mess around. Of all people.
African American saves our country again
six months ago. That counts.
Made-make. Given to, and allowed. Me.
Allowed, yes. And questioned.
Doorways and Doors.
The too many ways.
Bury me in a free land,
This is a package in the mail to Kevin Young,
Phillis Wheately. Lift every voice in the dark tower.
Ballads from Gwendolyn Brooks to Bob Kaufman,
and the ancestors, the ancestors,
it seemed like they were all ancestors
and then it happened with Gilbert.
Even in blue light sutras Jesus remains.
Praise songs for today.
That’s Terrance Hayes stepping
from the basketball game to the poem.
After the hurricane la negra
takes Medusa to the hair salon.
Somos muchas/os. Langston knew it then.
What a book, this one, one to take me home.
II. B. What Happens Reading Blue Sutras
Between weekends at museums
who I think I am, questioned, tested,
re-affirmed, but still, this isn’t about me.
Created by a granddaughter, this time:
Grandma, didn’t you go to a bonsai museum.,
I’m trying to create new images of women’s beauty.
Bruised eyes at 15, she sees ahead of her time
what’s wrong. She sees the bonsai
in my back yard, knows this beauty.
Small trees with cut roots
in elegant pots. Wired towards
what’s natural, and the ancestors,
flowing limbs in mid-breeze
and the exaggerated exposure of trunk.
Grandma, didn’t you go to a bonsai museum?
Behind her question,
How shall I find beauty in us all?
*
Between visits to Seattle Museum,
Unsettling Femininity at the Frye
probes politics of looking and viewing
images of women, I’m reading
250 Years of Struggle and Song,
African American poetry anthology
needing its early ancestors in order
to become the one that takes us into time:
I open to Blue Sutras, 1976-1989,
reading only the women, the years
women matured with the tradition
as they became the tradition, breaking
into daylight. Breaking into text-to-be,
thread-rule, ancient ones made scripture.
Over two days, from Ai, afraid that
if I let go, I’d live—And don’t I lead them
like a good shepherd? To epic
Cleopatra vision: ...what I want
is the weight of Imperial Rome.
Persistence. Word turned bumper
sticker in American electoral politics
shows up first in June Jordan,
This is the difficult miracle of Black
poetry in America: that we persist,
published or not, and loved or unloved:
we persist. Thank you Ms. Jordan,
most grateful for the epigraph, Kevin Young.
Brown girl levitation, these poems
have direct bearing on the future
of all grand daughters, each girl,
girl-woman-elder. Each man.
And on her wedding day, she wept,
Lorna Goodison, who pronounced
my blood holy. These poems
repair each time they’re opened.
Each day, on successive days,
a photo of my granddaughter
before me, a different sutra
speaks truth. Erica Hunt appears,
Would I recognize my name in the voice
from the burning bush?--These
birthdays don’t need to be rationed.
It doesn’t matter where one turns.
Ntozake Shange is the Sunday School teacher:
I found god in myself
& I loved her/ I loved her fiercely.
Xosa. She who comes into her own things…
She who walks like a lion.
Are you saying, these sutras
make one long poem? I am.
It happened by accident.
Once I was interrupted.
Once I was finished and lost
my computer text. Gone,
I told my wife. It’s gone.
Splayed grace on drenched sky,
random line in Patricia Smith.
These Praise Songs For The Day.
Does the title for this book
come from the Elizabeth Alexander
poem, and these are poets just
going about their business?
Salt, teeth, and correct pronunciation
of my name, Aracelis, little propeller
helicopters falling in mass from
the maple tree. Gift every time
from one privileged enough
to hold this book. And one more,
reading on a stool at the tire shop,
going back and forth between poems
and the biography section, after
Robin Coste Lewis’ research
of titles, catalogs, and black female
entries, I begin writing down
listed titles by the women.
Another poem. 10,000 poets
in the mothership of our time.
250 Years of Struggle and Song.
These 15-year old girls, daughters
of elders bound: test, question, develop.
*
a kind of coda
Among the doors and doorways
at the Frye—so many gods
in thresholds—so many ages!
Black marketplace
and one freestanding
Anastacia-Reneé (Don’t be Absurd)
Alice in Parts, devotee of Audre Lorde,
constructs the Church of Lorde
in a red room, Alice in Parts
delivers the eulogy
offering a rageful meditation.
Alice in Parts is a city girl
with Lorde’s poems on every wall.
This struggle-song’s not a done deal
and there’s hope in that, too.
III. Dear Darkness: Or Notes on Food While Reading Kevin Young’s poem
Below us he hears
as the dead must, the day
speaking to itself, muttering
--Kevin Young, Eulogy
He is trying to break my heart.
This curator-poet working long hours
knows lone time needs
I won’t/don’t pick from ode’s
already anointed sauce and smoke
rivals for God’s affections--
Say when!
Flipping pages backward
what gets said about pork bows
remembers my father’s feet
he got to the car but never
went back to work, turns out
it’s the prayer, not black-eyed peas
showing here, every un-proud
impulse and sounds in line-breaks
and dark luck coming into the city
just enough, just enough Stevie Wonder,
innervision prayer on edge
blues in water, how Jacob Lawrence
shows the granddaughter how to paint
water’s dark light, not a summer soldier,
that prayer for black-eyed peas--
that one, Aunt Toota and gravy,
every night doubled, doubled,
this magnificence.
Jim Bodeen
March—May 2021
TWICE EASTER--LITTLE ROCK & YAKIMA: FOOT-STOMPING MATTER
THIS IS THE DAY THE LORD HAS MADE,
TWICE EASTER, 2021, A SUITE OF POEMS
for pastors Jewel R. Withers, Jr. & Kathleen Anderson
Little Rock, Arkansas—Yakima, Washington
and for Rex Deloney, Colorist, Little Rock, Arkansas, &
Karen Bodeen, Fabric artist, Yakima
AFTERWARD OR FORWARD
Walking the yard, pruner in your old leather
holster, lopper in hand, that Monday
after Easter, how was it? You stopped,
as always, by the Hinoki Cedar
and bonsai-like, Pinus Contortis, lost
in trunk diameter beauty, foolishly probing
ungloved hands into the pine
after dead needles, giving new growth
a better chance for sunlight. More
meditation than prayer. More nature
than Christ, even as you believe
without doubting, Christ-presence
in the branch? How was it, Easter?
LET THEM EAT CAKE?
Twice blessed Easter, This is the day
the Lord has made, twice. Worship
streaming from your native place,
and again, from Rex in Little Rock.
This is the day the Lord has made,
three days, Friday to Sunday, and while
the faithful wait out Saturday,
you get married children and grandchildren,
out door and verified proof of new life’s
transfigurations. Stones, cairns, boulders
marking way, nothing hidden, no one
waiting for anything except cake,
early baked in your oven, new
recipe, coconut cream injected
to sweeten what’s already sweet,
Flaked coconut spread over whipped
cream. This is the day that the Lord
has made a day early.
You live
with a fabric artist, your friends
poets, painters, jewelers, surrounded
by all desire that may be delivered.
Sol y sombra, you move at will
from beauty to beauty, silence and word.
Let them eat cake.
“SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS…” WILLIAM BLAKE
Such are the joys of listeners,
great inheritors of Catherine
and William Blake up through fabric
artists come through the rural south
the quilter Rosie Lee Tompkins,
and Alice Walker’s two sisters arguing
what’s to be done with Mama’s quilts
in the story Every Day Use--
frame and bequeath them in wills
or wrap bodies warm, exhausting
their threads so you may better know
the cost of your grandmother’s love?
Among the questions, Eli Leon.
Eli Leon, her champion.
They meet at a flea market
in Oakland, red thread
among everything gold.
These questions, along with similar
others, are your only unknowns
waiting for sunrise on Easter morning.
You are the one who remembers
the Jim Harrison poem. You still
hold out for more justice, Easter Morning,
proud, poor white peasants, where
we come from, who we are, frying potatoes
in bacon grease, joining the army
for the GI bill in exchange
for being shot at. The dice.
ASCENDANT INNOCENCE
Listening first from your butterscotch
chair in the living room, with your notebook,
the visiting pastor, an interim you haven’t
bothered to meet, Kathleen Anderson,
her name, baptizing a child, breaks out
into giggles, overcome with joy
before the baby, surrounded by family.
She giggles again reading Mark’s gospel.
Pout and be gone, poetry man—your wife
feels what you cannot on Easter. More
proof in how much you are loved.
throw water from palm branches on all.
Worship again while you walk. Following
worship reading from Eddie Glaude Jr.,
the black professor’s rare book,
Uncommon Faith: A Pragmatic Approach
to the Study of African American Religion.
You, who have had late coffee and oranges
with your wife of half a century, Sunday
Morning, carrying Wallace Stevens.
You, who hears Duke Ellington play,
Come Sunday, coming through Archie Shepp’s horn.
My Lord, what a morning. Rare book,
headphones in your ears, Church of God in Christ,
walking Yakima in Little Rock,
this may be your come to Jesus moment
on Easter, walking the neighborhood in clothes
hand-sewn by your artist wife. Hand-carved
walking stick from a cottonwood tree
from the hands of the ancestor-griot himself,
your friend, Gil Chandler. Walk,
my privileged friend, listen.
Holy Temple Cathedral, where the distance
is worth the difference. Rex brings me
through the door. Senior pastor
Bishop Jewel R. Withers Jr.
Hand clapping. Foot-stopping.
Clap hands, clap hands.
Far from shoreline, but the boat,
the boat’s right—get in the boat
Getting through Saturday.
Rex the colorist. Artist, painter, pilgrim.
Coach too? He did some coaching.
Brush man. Jesus man.
CROSS-COMPANION
Saturday’s the day my children
will be here, the pastor’s wife says.
Saturday’s my Sunday.
Jesus understands. Jesus
knows all the Sunday songs.
Resisting breath is resisting God
Cross-walking.
What?
Resisting white supremacy.
A cross-walking.
Easter’s uncommon faith provides.
To be otherwise. Being so.
A yes to how broken we really are.
On my Easter morning porch,
Professor Glaude, cup in hand,
Pragmatism encounters the underside…
Thrown into the messiness
of living. Who’s that behind him?
Is that, no, could it be Howard Thurman?
This, the invocation of Jesus,
a distinctive form of Christ,
a change of will, no longer content.
No longer resigned—daring
to be otherwise--
otherwise with the green light of no guarantee
Walking the development with earphones
This is Easter Sunday in Little Rock
after the song--
way out, way through, way maker,
man on a walk, man in a pew
looking at the back side, beginning.
“They didn’t kill him,” Bishop Withers says,
“He died on his own terms. Those sad ones,
living in the past. When my wife
hands me a jar that’s too tight,
I’m not giving it back until it’s open.”
Use everything. Women smiling, men chuckling,
that tiniest crack acknowledges the past in the moment.
We stand on diseased, distorted and deformed ground,
directed against us, here where a different way
of being in the world, a made-possible us,
in new space, a foundation made of shards.
*
Walking the Sunday yard, sun-stoned, altared
Sun-stoned altar
Alter-chained, changed
Re-written halleluiah
To save us from ourselves
Blessed by the question that carries
Eat long, as long as I can
Live Easter, as long as we can
*
The Lutheran pastor now, singing camp songs
from the pulpit, Pastor Kathleen,
So high you can’t get over it.
You gotta come in through the door.
Door, door space, threshold aha back at you.
The women knew exactly which tomb
overwhelmed by trauma and ecstasy.
Cross-companion every day.
She asks, What else really matters?
In the garden
you can say it twice
What else matters.
Say, Amen.
This is Easter.
Little Rock Yakima Easter.
*
WHAT ELSE REALLY MATTERS?*
*Pastor Kathleen Anderson
Reading sandwich recipes on the telephone
I may think that I want to read.
A small yellow-bellied finch
lands on bird bath with fresh water.
Another one waits on a nearby branch
of the Ed Wood Half-Moon Maple.
Sunday morning. Come Sunday.
Ellington wrote it for Mahalia.
It’s for all of us. Kathleen Battle
and Johnny Mathis. Ben Webster
and Oscar Peterson. That’s the day.
Finch in the birdbath. Finch in the maple.
Old man in the lawn chair with coffee.
Surrounded by Easter-image music blind.
Practicing in paradise.
This glimpse of the accessible, accessed,
if only in the doorway, glimpsed.
What resurrection is.
Before me in the safety of my own house, a quilter
and the story of Rosie Lee Tompkins.
Rosie Lee Tompkins, from Gould,
74 miles from Little Rock. And Rex.
But beautiful. Clap hands.
Unknowns and risks in every color.
Walk me to the threshold.
The gospel of what shows up
The gospel of who in wonder.
Jim Bodeen
4-14 April 2021–10 May 2021
Letter to Mr. Frederick Douglass % of David W. Blight
LETTER TO MR. FREDERICK DOUGLASS
% OF DAVID W. BLIGHT, FROM YAKIMA/
YAKAMA, MAY, 2021, AFTER COFFEE
WITH THE SHIELD MAKER AND THE POET
Ah, Douglass, we have fall’n on evil days,
Such days as thou, not even thou didst know
“Douglass”, Paul Lawrence Dunbar
And above all, Frederick Douglass.
“The Talented Tenth”, W. E. B. DuBois
Through the ones carrying your story.
W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Dunbar, first grief
after your crossing. For David W. Blight
brings you forward this morning.
First talk at our table, of Crazy Horse,
never photographed. The poet reads
a hand-written copy from Ian Frazier.
“He was never captured because he was so free
that he didn’t know what a jail looked like.”
I can read you the entire thing in two minutes.
With you, Mr. Douglass, with Whitman,
Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Lincoln and Twain,
Crazy Horse: one of the men who came back
for the three of us. Another note, by way
of catching up. Black poets bow
before you in gratitude. Their poems,
markers, apprenticeship, cairns,
for 10,000 ways forward. Eloquent
and caustic sage, Joseph Seaman Cotter, Sr,
crossing time with you, continues,
ones ...of fluent tongue and trashy pen
will strive to imitate thee. Dunbar’s
reach continues: Oh, for thy voice high-sounding
o’er the storm...your presence bringing
blast-defying power. Dunbar’s sonnet
mirroring, seeing as you saw:
...salient, at the cross of devious ways...
Closer to me, Robert Hayden’s sonnet
on freedom--...this beautiful terrible thing
needful to man as air, usable as earth--
when it belongs at last to all as instinct,
brain matter, not gaudy...Douglass
shall be remembered. You, the mentor
in Gwendolyn Brooks’ “Mentors”:
I swear to keep the dead upon my mind…
I’ll stop my casual business. Leave the banquet.
Exceptional one of the talented tenth.
Developing money makers or men,
DuBois asks. No movement without men
like Douglass: Self-trained, but yet trained liberally.
….and so we come to the present—a day
of cowardice and vacillation.
It is May, 2021. My friend is 82 years old,
and we sit unmasked, three of us drinking coffee,
giving books on a birthday to our friend.
Crazy Horse is a prophet, he never ate at a table, one says.
The idea of becoming a farmer never crossed his mind.
We’re not alone with our coffee.
The book is your muse, Frederick Douglass.
I have no creed to uphold, no government to defend,
and as a nation, I belong to none. The land
of my birth welcomes me only as a slave.
A word standing on its own. Said, not said.
David Blight helps me understand Jubilee.
Cancellation and the end of debts, retirement.
He sits with us, too.
My friends and I are not here
to talk about the plague
but you can be certain,
we know what surrounds us.
Like you, Blight delights in the sentence,
and the image: But that was memory
acting as desire for love. About
Blight’s telling, I say this:
Don’t miss the Preface or epigraph.
Prophet keys running from Old Testament
King James Bible through Abraham Heschel.
Hechel couldn’t stand contentment,
crossed Pettus Bridge with King.
Personal cataclysm an entry door.
Blight has the ear for Douglass.
Playmates are natural abolitionists.
We three abolitionists.
Believer and contrarian.
Nineteen months in England. Irish songs.
Imagine the boat ride home.
Every man is an abolitionist,
but every man doesn’t have courage
to liberate others. My favorite Blight story?
You with John Brown. Mine was as
the taper light, his was as the burning sun.
Entire pages underlined. Meeting with John Brown
disguised as a fisherman camped among bleak rocks.
Note in margin—my wife stopping me. OK, Jim,
How can I read my book, if you’re going to read
your book to me? The two of you: compelling.
800 pages one at a time, twice. Naming chapters,
convergence of text and speech, if you get stuck
skip ahead and go back. Don’t miss how
long life reaches the 20th Century, how close
we are in time ourselves. Blight calls you
the prose poet of the body politic. He, too,
fueled by Haden’s poem. ...legacies bleeding
forward from slavery and color lines.
His magnificent final sentence.
Stay a bit.
*
Sojourner Truth sits in the front row listening
as Frederick Douglass speaks. On this occasion,
this life. Adopted story. Children of Israel.
Intimate photos—Douglass and Heschel
alongside each other. Influenced images?
King making the Hebrew Bible
central to Civil Rights, Christianity.
Didn’t Douglass do this, David Blight?
Watching a movie this morning on PBS.
Hassidism. Mysticism.
The Audacity of Heschel.
Audacity of Douglass. Overcome by God.
Somewhereness, everywhereness.
That kind of wonder after a bicycle ride.
Like Crazy Horse. Because he was
never the Indian on the nickle.
I’m an abolitionist.
My friends as well.
Three abolitionists.
Crazy Horse on the lawn with Douglass.
Witness-box, jury-box, ballot-box.
And the imagination. Add that.
Ancient wisdom and metaphor.
Turned loose to the open sky.
Jim Bodeen
2018-2021
STILL WITH THE STONES
STILL WITH STONES
Still doubting, I return to these grand
ones battered by surf, ancient hair
tossed and dried by sunlight,
looking again, Iphone
photographing angles,
green seaweed, not hair,
to confirm my doubt, to leave,
convinced. They’re only stones.
They’re not ancestors.
This is not a face.
This is not the body of my brother.
My brother.
Jim Bodeen
3 May2021
Listen to Some Songs
*
Listen to some songs
Sam Cooke’s Last Mile of the Way
Everybody
Jim Bodeen
4 May 2021
FOR QUINCY TROUPE % OF KEVIN YOUNG
FIRST THINGS
for Quincy Troupe % of Kevin Young
While coffee brews in kitchen
I’m in bathroom getting ready
for morning, two books on cabinet,
I pick up Kevin Young’s Blues Poems,
lovely Everyman’s fitting like a song
in my hand, Bessie’s arms open
in sequins, her singing smile
and Quincy Troupe’s woke up
cry for severed sight of another day.
4 April 1968, writing for Martin.
Recounting the morning after,
subliminal sadness being his third key,
absorbing me. The other two,
creative joy and happiness.
I walk the yard at sunrise
trees opened for songbirds,
and songbirds here in the dogwood,
thistle-full finches on feeder.
Long shadows in stones and me
with sun on my back. Lost futures
in sand and sun. Blue cloth covering.
Quincy Troupe writes three poems,
makes love, a poem accepted.
I’m in Viet Nam on that day,
85th Evac Hospital, sending soldiers home,
writing about that last night
to a woman still with me,
I’m with three black brothers
all of us asking about ourselves
and going home to what.
It’s in the letter, Kevin.
Get it to Quincy. It’s sunshine,
here, songbird beautiful,
but it was Quincy and the blues
that started the morning.
Jim Bodeen
3 May 2021
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