"LORD, LORD, THEY CUT GEORGE JACKSON DOWN" Bob Dylan

 

“LORD, LORD, THEY CUT GEORGE JACKSON DOWN”

              --Bob Dylan

Flurries on way to White Pass.

I’ve packed the wrong Mothership Log.

Discover this when I pull off 12

to photograph Rimrock.

Snow on ice.

Different than last week’s spotted dog.

Listening to Bob. -- 

Dylan Wake from Ron Marshall dream selections.

Ron gone. Empty joy-heart songline.

What doesn’t recover.

Some are prisoners, some guards.

My son on his way to work.

My feet are chained up, he says.

Walking on the mountain.

53. I put him on skis at 3.

Made him cookies and sent him a photo.

I’ll eat them at High Camp

with my sandwich. Try to talk

to Karen about Cormac this morning.

Phone rings. Rings three times.

Synesthesia in Keats and Shakespeare

Cormac punctuates it with a period.

The day my teacher explained it my son was born.

I thought it was a literary term.

Half century gone. It all opens

like jazz to those walking sidewalks

from nowhere. Life goes large

going empty in a parking lot of beauty.

I park close to the port-a-potty

covered in snow. I’ll be riding skis

crossing the moon, picked out by my son

for his dad, really too old to fly like this.

This is the year after the Long Walk,

1216 miles circumambulating

the construction site clockwise.

That teacher saying, Synesthesia,

90, missing his great toe.

I sit in the back end of a Honda Fit

tightening boots to help me see around corners.

African-American commemorative stamps

showing me how to negotiate snow.

A new canon. Scripture-Forever stamps.

We need these stamps more than the stamps need us.

Jim Bodeen

27 February 2023

TWO FROM INSIDE LAST NIGHT'S 2 AM

 

TWO FROM INSIDE LAST NIGHT’S 2AM

Back and forth in time

Witness eternal movement

Notebook within reach

Dream body never rests

Most repetitious calling

●

Guide posted at gate

High altitude snow slumber

Trying now for sleep

Wind chill has temps killing trees

Bees wax candles light shared prayers

Jim Bodeen

25 February 2023

WHAT THE HINOKI CYPRESS DID TO HIM THIS TIME

 

WHAT THE HINOKI CYPRESS DID TO HIM THIS TIME

If a person can get the reading of scripture right,

punctuation, tone, delivery—including pauses,

and get out of the way of one’s self,

one might upset the body in such a way

that trails change, and even blood circulating

in the body listens. Writing after loss

in a notebook without context.

A favorite tree, the Hinoki Cypress,

ten years old at planting,

another ten years in the ground,

was dead. His link between

the word and the garden is now broken.

And when I get to the point

of doing nothing, he says to himself,

Do even less. Volubility,

once a gift, talkativeness,

enthusiasm, illusion itself is good.

Realizing the story in the book

is his wife’s story, compassion’s

quiet breath re-enters the room

through a television screen.

He was reading a book.

Through abandonment

she had become one of the world’s great mothers.

He turns into the nursery’s driveway

from the wrong direction. The nursery

under Mt. Si’s rain cloud, off the highway

on Valentine’s Day where his dreaming

had told him he might find

Slender Hinokis, smaller, but wrapped

in burlap with root balls,

he has forgotten his medicine

on his way to the mecca of medicine,

and here, between worlds, layerings

of cloud and highway between

himself and destination, he drives

straight through to the trees, and where

she appears, Who is she?,

in a gravelled driveway

from the half-dome greenhouse, saying,

Let me cut this twine from its branches

and open her so that you might view

the lines to the trunk. He knows

the best time to have planted these trees

was ten years ago, and those

ten years are gone. Lost

in this kind of thought, he sees her ring

as she cuts the plastic rope with her knife--

Oh, my ring. It’s made from Damascus Steel.

She straightens, and lays her hand in his

to show him. It’s hard and soft woven carbon.

The forged steel of sword blades,

Damascus steel smithed in the Near East

from ingots of Wootz steel, its patterns

of banding and mottling of flowing water

form ladders and roses. She turns again

back towards the trunk of the Hinoki.

Yes, these trees, smaller after the pandemic,

nurseries suffer first and here’s the news.

Crucible moments in ultra high carbon steel.

Tough and weathered trees, sharp, resilient.

Weapon blades and wedding rings.

Scripture in an oral tradition.

The moment is never the same twice.

Can you put a ribbon around this tree,

tagging it with my name?

It is like the naturalness of breathing

how he will pass on this waking language.

Jim Bodeen

15 February 2023

HERE COMES THE TRAIN

 

HERE COMES THE TRAIN

I can tell by the rumble

and the whistle

After I told Karen the news

her soul dropped

her disappointment that great

You said you had good news

and my friends said

Maybe he found some

new green growth

in the Hinoki Cypress

Maybe the winter

didn’t get that tree afterall

Maybe there are no good words sometimes

We walked around the kitchen

We shared some hugs

We each had a frozen chocolate chip cookie

taken from the freezer

I think I’ll go to Costco, Karen says

And I’ll take my brother to the airport

Jim Bodeen

9 February 2023

STEAL AWAY

 

STEAL AWAY*

for Tom Moore III

There’s the list of memories

before me on my lap

and I’ll toss out a few

on your birthday weekend:

music, books, and stones

among them, that easy smile

before friends. Here:

Garden poems, Edna St. Vincent Millay,

Jeff bridges. That hike with our dogs

into the Goat Rocks, the two of us.

But for the family, Lisa

and the kids, this,

this black and white thing--

Hank Jones and Charlie Haden.

Black hands on the keyboard,

Charlie Haden’s stand-up country bass,

playing spirituals together.

How could anyone know, Tom,

those gospel sounds strumming

sorrow into joy could be foundational?

Bones in Hank Jones’ fingers riddled

with disease might break in mid-chord.

It’s me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer.

You gave me that song, Tom.

And one year you gave me quartz,

size of a fist, translucent, white.

The next year, a piece of obsidian,

shiny arrowhead black glass.

Black and white. The Chinese boatman

on the Yellow Sea. Song, poem, stone,

sustain one’s practice. Quartz, obsidian,

black and white, side by side

in a bonsai pot, where I place this love,

time-treasured. One side to the other,

everyday’s garden walk, there you are

coming up in a song.

*Steal Away: Spirituals, Hymns and Folk Songs, by Charlie Haden & Hank Jones, 1994. A gift from Tom Moore.

Jim Bodeen

29 January 2023