COLLAPSING MEMORY
Hard gold to love, the poem.
Oh! Mama!
Jim Bodeen
29 November 2021
Q & A
Q & A
--for Karen
Is this what you washed
the floor with?
Karen asks,
coming into the room.
You put this in with my clean clothes?
Come here.
Put this in your ear,
I say, taking
one hearing aid
from mine.
Did you get it?
Yeah.
Nora Jones singing
to Charles Lloyd’s saxophone,
You are so beautiful.
Jim
20 November 2021
LETTER TO PASTOR RON MARSHALL ON KIERKEGAARD FROM YAKIMA, 17 NOVEMBER 2021, DAY OF YOUR FUNERAL
LETTER TO PASTOR RON MARSHALL ON KIERKEGAARD
FROM YAKIMA, 17 NOVEMBER 2021, DAY OF YOUR FUNERAL
When his only wish is to die,
not until then, does Christianity begin.1
--Soren Kierkegaard
Ron,
Inter librar y loan got me these 2.
Coe’s book helps me understand so much,
and have Luther’s sermons—
the 3 earmarked—Thks too
for lifting them up.
Got stuck on Hannay—
will try again.
4 more days before due.
Thks so much for reviews and earlier stuff. jb
-- Email from my I-phone
You never got this! Punched out-thumb-written note,
and two days later, --the electronic letter from Nesvig
beginning after you’ve already gone, leaving with instructions:
Don’t Preach Yourself: Sermon Six—Nothing plausible,
but demonstration. Draw out the love, praise love.
Underlined notes from your Kierkegaard
for the Church, Essays and Sermons, mine.
Per your instructions found by parish secretary,
funeral begins at 3 pm, No other words to be spoken,
This funeral is my last will and testament.
By overcoming our separation with one another,
we’ll be honoring Christ’s mediation on the cross.
Your last words in Chapter Six, my signed copy,
open. Sitting with books, Marshall’s, Kierkegaard’s,
biographies, dissertations and reviews—some,
yours—a week to absorb this life, daily practice.
But your last reviews, mis-sent, wrong address,
arrived! Loyola Marymount University
sent brand un-opened, never-read, books,
and three weeks—between time, underlining,
Since it is faith that makes a work good, rather
than a specific work, a man with faith can perform
good works in any estate, vocation in which God
has ordained and called him—for me validating
notebook, poem, and poet. One line among 100s
I wanted to share with you. I love you for having
Luther and Kierkegaard quotes in your casket
for the taking. I love you, too, for your love
of the footnote, and for being a footnote
in your life. I’ve re-read Jelly for Kierkegaard
in the Jelly Poems believing God let them
come through me, Kierkegaard saying,
for you believed in the dangerous call
of the poet, “...for one who is not in danger
cannot be saved.” In this—my first letter to you,
Dear Ron, in Heaven, let me devote my praise
to the footnote, a high-water mark in your books,
footnotes, your sources say, ‘...are where the author
takes his reader into his confidence...what he really thinks…
two parties can both be reconciled without being wrong…
According to Luther, poetry, music, and humor
are better means to express God’s love of the sinner
in Christ than logic...the task of the religious poet
is to repel disciples while stirring movements of faith…
Yes, you suffer, but you must love your pain,
because it is Christ’s pain…’ I cite your footnotes,
Pastor, not your sources, and give pause:
silence to better hear your great laughter.
Best we go into the cloak room and pray.
No better end—but a better beginning?--
than a return to your funeral instructions:
I’ve witnessed so many horrid pastor’s funerals.
Don’t ruin mine too. Don’t preach yourself,
p. 280, the service is about to begin.
Sitting by fire, I open to Job 14:10:
Cada día de mi servicio obligatorio
(obligatorio over hard),
your service, Ron, delivered
with joy,--skipping to Verse 15
not included, You will call.
I will turn my ear to a proverb,
in Psalm 49. Paul on the body
in 1 Corinthians, ‘sown in dishonor,
debilidad, raised in glory.’ And John,
‘Not to condemn, but through him,
save, God gives the Spirit without limit.’2
Nothing else. No tributes. Nothing.
Sermon Six: Jesus, shield for God’s wrath.
Intercessor, advocate. Access to grace.
Not pleasure, but great common life.
FOONOTE’S RIFFING3
Down here, pushing page margin
boundaries, it’s own borderland,
we’re accustomed to smaller fonts,
fewer type faces, form-checked
over content, gate-keepers
wave us through
like we had passports
It’s a good time, Bob’s
here, inked, blues-fed
basement boy-noise
you ain’t goin, NO
where—Mavis,
Sam Cooke, & Langston
making trouble
for the teacher
who put us in these
God-awful rows
and rows of nothing
but trombones
bass-cleft women
gathered around Jesus
sitting real close
to Coltrane
who felt this
Love Supreme
before it came down
any track, any drum4
Jim Bodeen
1Kierkegaard’s Jelly—for Ron Marshall, The Jelly Poems, Jim Bodeen
2“The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands.”
3“I want to make a case for Kierkegaard’s place in the Church today.” Ron Marshall, Kierkegaard for the Church: Sermons and Essays, p. 2. Threshold, gate, way. Camino. Senda. Umbral. Poesía. Poetry and many voices. “An invisible listener, God in Heaven.” S.K. Ibid. p. 47. Many voices. Many ears. “Now more than ever seems it rich to die...Thou wast not born for Death, Immortal Bird.” John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale.
4Footnote’s Riff was inspired while walking the neighborhood during the third mile, and jotted on a piece of paper, following the funeral of Ron Marshall, 17 November 2021, and completed the morning of the 18th. Elvin Jones is the drummer for Coltrane on A Love Supreme. Poem and footnotes by Jim Bodeen https://storypathcuentocamino.blogspot.com/
*
POST CARD TO RON MARSHALL, IN HEAVEN,
HAND-CANCELLED AT WIDE HOLLOW POST OFFICE:
FOOTNOTE ON THE FINAL SERMON,
DON’T SAVE YOURSELF—A FOOTNOTE
Turns out I was given erroneous, and extra,
unsupposed unfiltered light, your final sermon
doubled, twice delivered.
Don’t preach yourself, Don’t try to save yourself.
The poem reports before it happens,
trying to keep up with love doubled;
the second, simultaneously pulpit-breathed.
In the moment, Rage, rage, don’t, don’t don’t--
there is no gentle, Dylan Thomas. Can’t,
you just can’t do it, the end “will drive you
to Christ.”
Ron Marshall baptized into hope.
Simul justus et peccator. In the same moment.
Both back at you. Kierkegaard’s,
Love forth, last breath breathing,
Love forth the love that loves you.
Jim Bodeen
22 November 2021
AND HOLY LONELINESS
AND HOLY LONELINESS
And holy loneliness...worn by the always changing shape…
--Conrad Aiken, A Letter from Li Po
I. Outside on a plastic chair, late November
sun warming the notebook, lifting the poem
while the young man, on his back before me,
replaces the rusted-out generator muffler
on the mother-ship; mis-appropriated hope
that light holds off what’s dark and cold.
Morning travel from hospital bed to jail,
packed beauty of the poem yielding
harvest joy while receiving
all the news, all of it, hourly, infinitesimal,
and vast; the re-newable vow.
II. Arriving as Kierkegaard, all-ways
untimely. Temporal and eternal
encyclopedia of sin wound inside
the clock. Needed recognition
of the City of Stars, Star River-
Heaven-Milky Way, one of many.
Not a pleasant fast.
Sucking fish bones dry three times.
not to merit grace
carrying the word that carries me.
III. Marriage arrives as the last option.
And it must have been terror for Karen
to be the only, and absolute,
and I knew nothing of the husband.
Last option, early arrival.
Why me? to be so lucky.
IV. The cross again
In the August, 2021 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Wyatt Mason, in an article titled, ‘Seven Steps to Heaven,’ writes of Jon Fosse’s novel, Septology, published in three volumes, one available, still, only as an ebook. In the first person narrative, Asleik, a painter, looks at his painting on the easel which consists of two lines crossing, ‘the brown line and purple line cross.’ Of the dozen or so friends I send the article to, exclusively a painter, a jeweler, five poets, five pastors, (the five and five, here, a coincidence), the painter and jeweler, one person), two respond, one a poet, one a retired Lutheran pastor. Meanwhile, I have read Septology in its entirety, even Wyatt Mason, had only read the two published books, The Other Name, and I Is Another. I was as grateful to have access to the third, A New Name, as I had been by Wyatt Mason’s article. Mason has previously written of book criticism as ‘pablum.’
The poet who responded, brought the copy of the xeroxed Mason/Fosse essay listened while I talked on the front porch of places I thought Fosse had written particularly to him. He didn’t have much to say, forcing me into a kind of monologue. Here, listening to myself talk, I learned even more of the Saint Andrews Cross.
The pastor who responded, sent me a poem he’d written, unsigned, as his signature, (he believes nothing man does on his own without God is possible) ‘Joseph Sittler, Whacked.’ Even the title, a non-title, but the subject line in an email. But in his poem, ‘said the shape of the cross, the vertical line crossed by the horizontal line, symbolize being “whacked”: sweat, flesh and blood splattered in all directions. The cross is the symbol of human experience in this world.’ My old friend, my senior by a dozen years (I’m 76) had sent me this poem before, flattening me with Sittler’s words, further down in the poem, saying, ‘you need a bigger god.’ Years earlier, this same man, had lifted me up with one of Sittler’s essays, The View From Mount Nebo, demonstrating the clarity artists and outsiders have, and share, with Aaron and Moses, brothers, as Moses acutely focuses on the promised land from his point of view, without entering. Lifted up, did I just say? Ah, the experience of the summit. Fact of a crucified god. ‘Unless you have it,’ Sittler writes. He’s not big enough.
Another pastor, one who has not given up, and who hasn’t given up on me, but who has given up on my need for his communication, a generous silence on his part, a trust, really, is the rare still-practicing Lutheran pastor who reads Luther and Kierkegaard daily, daily and simultaneously, and who preaches what he practices, has just reviewed two new Kierkegaard studies investigating Luther’s Sermons and Kierkegaard’s journals. This is the backstory on how these two new books arrived for me through Inter-library Loan, one by David Lawrence Coe, the other by the Norwegian theologian, Alastair Hannay, Existence and Identity in a Post-Secular World. With a limited (and gifted) window, I have five more days (from a total of fourteen) to absorb these two volumes, brand new and unread, from the Loyola Marymount University Library.
My Navajo friend Lloyd Draper says that Hozho, the Blessingway, reveals God through thunder. He, too, is in this mix, and serves to introduce the fence-line cross that confronted me as my brother and I hiked to the top of Rocky Top, setting for another poem and a version of the painting in the Jon Fosse novel, The Other Name. The trail is full of crossing lines through circles of barbed wire. Professor Coe explores suffering, the sighs, resolved and resigned, in Kierkegaard and Luther. Sin, to Kierkegaard being time’s obstruction
of the eternal. While walking after worship on Sunday, I called my jeweler-painter friend, who brings me news of the Milky Way, only one of many, telling him, imploring, Don’t ever allow me to lose sight of how much we need to see this creation as a city of stars. He, too, listened, like my friend the poet listened. What did I hear myself saying? How did I get here? Where did I come from?
When asked about influenza, the Blessingway Singer looks off the question. No, we will have not of that. It is not our business, he says. The plague is not ours.
The Saint Andrews Cross and the cross of the fence-posts.
Joseph Sittler and Jon Fosse.
Whacked. My old friend. And the mail.
Mail-whacked. Gob-smacked.
VI. Karl Barth and the God of my North Dakota Childhood. We knew it was cold in winter, that mosquitoes used our arms for landing strips. We didn’t know we walked on the bottom of a shallow sea. The Lutheran Church was across the street from our house, and our house and yard mirrored the church in size, if not stature. Admittedly, the house and the fence around us had seen better days.
Mosquitoes
fueled-up
sucking blood
from the arms
of boys like me
The front porch
came together
at a point
warped, weathered boards
sprung free from nails
Nothing held together
like God
and he was
right across the street--
an old man, now,
reading the likes
of Barth and Tillich,
comfortable, thrilled words,
In this one man
God sees every man,
all of us, as
through a glass--
the possibility
Barth arrived
at my porch
early on
filtered into North Dakota
through seminaries
and country pastors!
Maybe Grandpa Charlie.
Who could have guessed!
Karl Barth, my teacher,
God in Him,
in this One,
I heard it, I did,
but all I could see
were little critters
carving out homes
in warped boards
after the nails
came out,
beginning point
for humiliation.
VII. Muffler Bandit
On my red bicycle in November, this review.
Yesterday, all afternoon at the muffler shop
sitting outside on a chair.
Muffler Bandit, family owned.
A life-time in mufflers.
Keep it quiet.
Tin man, rusted on a snow-board,
masked, rusted sculpture
beside me
while I read
Aiken’s Letter from Li Po.
Things are slow at the jail,
busy in the hospital,
I write in my notebook.
ER’s a circle of curtains,
revolving beds. Jail boring,
with a machine for money orders
upon entering. Fully bilingual, and producing.
Money orders while you do your time.
Fully holstered guards
will help you make it work.
Lots of jail staff
taking home food
from the kitchen for their families.
Stolen jail food can’t be all bad.
IX. Muffler Bandit grace.
Kierkegaard’s little while,
little while to the end,
echoing Navajo Blessingway—
this is the only thing one can do
until he dies. Sing like this.
Sing us whole, sing us back.
Saying, No to influenza—
No, that’s not our work, not our business.
This is a great house, it is.
This is a great house.
It is a great house, sacred, it is.
X. Letter from Li Po and Conrad Aiken
Banished immortal
and all the news,
and the poem that is never done.
This garden where I walk
among cairn, tree,
sheltered shade--
But only if by this,
we mean everything!
The young man repairing
my rusted-out muffler
on his back, sliding
around on a bed of wheels,
extracts rusted out screws
with the patience
of one who knows
the power of his tools,
who knows, too,
this is not about him.
Screws are like nails.
They take a little while.
They’ll come.
Rust, too.
Beauty-way.
Patina and the sound-volume song
from sun-filled November pipes.
Jim Bodeen
1-10 November 2021
ALL SAINTS DAY HIKE TO ROCKY TOP
ALL SAINTS DAY HIKE TO ROCKY TOP
--Let’s go as far as that tree in the sun,
and then turn around.”
Jane Goodall, The Book of Hope:
A Survival Guide for Trying Times
When my brother walks through the door
I’m reading the book he brought last week,
and looking up, say to him, Let’s go
as far as that tree in the sun. He smiles
at the cover, Jane Goodall’s face is the sun,
he says, Let’s hike until we see her face.
Overcast and cold, we might be walking
the William O. Douglas Trail
until we get to Rainier.
Tahoma, he corrects me, Mt. Tahoma.
Out Summitview, we turn onto gravel,
Rocky Top Drive past dump grounds
on the right into the parking lot at trailhead.
My brother’s a coach. Women’s fastpitch,
baseball, half-century, retired. Atlanta
up 3 games to 1 against Astros, World Series.
Tell me about Color Analyst Jon Smoltz.
He wouldn’t get vaccinated,
Major League Baseball wouldn’t let him
in the booth. I like to hear him talk pitching.
Have you heard him talk about batters?
That guy likes to hit more than he wants
to get on base. Pitch him outside the strike zone.
Horse Trail’s wide and we walk side by side.
Trekking poles. My brother, 70, younger
by six years, asks about All Saints Day.
We’re walking fence lines, in and out of gates.
It’s rocky. His daughter, an elite runner
and mother of six kids, runs out here.
She got lost once, in the dark, he says.
She could turn an ankle. Her kids
won’t let her leave the house without
her phone. Back and forth talk,
wound wire draped over wood posts.
We’ll find a place at the top
and put down our jackets for a table cloth,
take out our sandwich and apple,
trail mix and shortbread cookie.
And water. We’ll ask Mom & Dad
to sit with us, Grandma and Charlie.
Then we’ll ask Lena (his wife),
and Tyler (our nephew) to the stone
we’ve made for a table. Maybe
we’ll light up our phones, pretending
they’re fireworks clearing the trail
for them to make the journey
through the night sky.
We’ll ask them to refresh themselves.
Lena and Tyler both died of glioblastomas.
We’ll ask all of our ancestors to gather.
This is the practice of complete inclusion.
This is memory gone past the act of remembering.
We talk North Dakota. We’ve traveled this road.
The two of us. Karen (my wife) just found out
that Victor, Dad’s Dad, remember when we looked
for him locked up somewhere in Crosby
half-mad and delirius, he was totally deaf
when he died. Did that big house
we lived in have an in-door toilet?
No, the privy was in the basement,
winding downstairs from the kitchen
around the cistern only partially covered
with boards, large as a room and deep, scary.
I remember the basement was scary,
Yes, the two-seater was there, beside the furnace,
and we had to shovel out clinkers
every morning. Dad did that.
We didn’t walk through the coal bin
to poop, but I can’t remember where
it was! We took baths in the kitchen
and the galvanized tub hung on the wall
going to the basement. The kitchen!
Oh my God! I’ve been counting doors
as we’ve been hiking. The kitchen
had four entrances. One door
outside to the side of the yard,
one door to the basement. One door led
upstairs the bedrooms with the long hallway,
and the last door opened to the dining room
and the main entrance to the house.
There were sliding doors that disappeared
into the walls off Mom and Dad’s bedroom.
I don’t know when they tore it down
but it was a decaying Victorian mansion
built by Great Northern Railroad,
and we lived in it rent-free because Dad
ran the elevator until we left in 1955.
Voices at Rocky Top Summit
by the cell tower, and fences everywhere.
Voices from two women, mother and daughter?
Mother’s got to be our age, fit. Daughter
on her cell phone. Chuck stops to talk
and I keep walking. If we cross under
the fence we’ll see Tieton and Yakima
going down. We lift the wires for each
other, rolling under barbs to the other side.
Our table made, we don’t spend
too much time with anybody,
OK, Mom, we’ll all have to eat fast. So sorry--
light rain falling, not quite a drizzle.
We take selfies by the post
holding the barbed-wire heart,
two brothers. I ask Dad if he liked
that almond butter, frozen blackberry jam
sandwich, and eat what’s left.
Three elaborate cairns, temple-like
on the way down. We replace
a couple of fallen stones.
Chuck breaks the silence
as we descend. When
was the last time one of us spoke?
Hope is a disruptor, kind of,
I say. Is walking also a form of hope?
I like listening to this rain
my brother says,
as it falls onto my hat.
Jim Bodeen
1-4 November 2021
PRAYING WITH THE INTERIM PASTOR
PRAYING WITH THE INTERIM PASTOR
--for Pastor Kathleen Anderson
She speaks silence for me
being interim myself
Jim Bodeen
29 October 2021
WINTER SQUASH
WINTER SQUASH
--for Marty
Every night in the oven,
sweet meat, moistened seeds
split, spooned, buttered,
and dripping with honey.
Late October, and rain.
Leaf fall and cascading silence.
The sharp blade slicing
through all the bullshit.
We’re doing just fine
in our resistance.
Jim Bodeen
25 October 2021
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