SUCH IS A DAY’S WORK
“Basically
only prayer exists
Our hands have been appointed for this.”
--Rilke, The Book of Hours
translation by Annemarie S. Kidder
For picking berries
Ben decir, Say Ah, Good things*
bucket full of God
Jim Bodeen
27 July 2023
*A Blessing for T. M.
SO I TELL KAREN,
the water song in the fountain
is greater than in past years.
What if the water
is no longer in a plastic box
but has developed
its own artesian source?
She laughs at me,
which turns my thinking
to my pastor-friend’s
children sermon last Sunday.
One of the kids says,
I’ve found a way
to get off the floor
without using my muscles.
The pastor says,
I love it,
but bring me a video.
I’m thinking,
Apply the same criteria
to adults. Show me
the video. Listen
with me now
as water washes water.
Jim Bodeen
20 July 2023
●
BLOOD GOOD MAPLE
Saturday rescue
Japanese helicopters
After washing floors
Jim Bodeen
15 July 2023
2PM MONDAY
Working in the Notebook
from 2019 at Holden
Glenn Jordan’s words
from that week in August
Public theologian
Thunder now, thunder then,
thunder earlier with rain
Lightning out bedroom window
and I bring in cushions in my pajamas
Transcribing words from a man who died
only proves that that man
didn’t die, that Irish father-husband
who celebrated his 30th anniversary with us
across the ocean in the mountains
that lover of Patrick Kavanagh
He’s so alive in me but one must be
careful it’s a different kind of existence,
I have not explained him. The sky
overhead is blue, there are rain
drops on the notebook page.
Thunder comes from the west.
Tonight Karen and I are serving food
at Camp Hope, the homeless shelter.
Sloppy Joes Karen says, I’m cutting
the buns, you’re filling them. This morning
while it rained I came in from porch
and made a raspberry pie,
bicycled listening to Cowboy Junkies,
Look out Mama there’s a white boat
coming up the river. Studio album.
Robins on the white fence are restless.
Spiders nipping my ankles. Karen
at her sewing machine, her quilt
RiverWalk, fills the living room
floor, water, reeds, everywhere.
At lunch we eat left-over brisket
from Saturday. I cut the raspberry pie,
crust gorgeous brown egg-washed glisten
but it’s too sour to eat. More rain drops.
Yesterday was the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost.
Hope comes up three times in a day.
Hope Street, a television cop show from England,
in Zachariah from yesterday’s scripture,
Return to your stronghold O prisoners of hope,
and in the tent city of the homeless
where we’ll serve Sloppy Joes.
I discover again my catalog—Esperanza
in Sandra Cisneros’ House on Mango Street,
a girl’s name in Spanish, from esperar
where to hope is also to wait. Afternoon
rain never comes and I put down
my Parker Pen on the Notebook
and pick up blowdown twigs from birch trees,
carrying them out front to yard bin
with my long pruners, ringing the bell,
closing the gate, noticing the Rose of Sharon
in full bloom. Earlier I felled large branches
from Kwanzaa Cherry and cut them now
small enough to fit into bin, thinking
head on, hearing Glenn’s voice
on the book of Ruth, most radical book
in the Bible. Ruth was a Moabite,
and she would always be one,
and always in danger, one of the others.
It would be easy for me to fall in love with Ruth.
This broken walk of wonder.
Complicit in the frontiers of empire.
How would one write about the Rose of Sharon?
Its blossom. Its leaf. Five-petaled flower,
frilled, light purple. And inside deep purple,
blood stained with five ink-like splotches
exploding outward from a fine brush,
disappearing starbursts like Chinese fireworks
reaching the outer-petal limits. Inside the petals
another star, yellow, tiny green and stem-brained.
Holding the stigma, the part of the pistil
where pollen germinates. The ovary
is the enlarged basal portion of the pistil
where ovules are produced. Looking
into magnificence, I hear April and Nino’s
Deep Purple singing to me across six decades,
falling over sleeping garden walls,
and the leaf itself, what to say about the leaf.
The robins still bantering their half-sing,
half-rancored upsetness on the white fence.
One must think of John Steinbeck, one must
visualize Rose of Sharon as she arrests us
on the final pages of Grapes of Wrath,
Ira de las uvas, and all of the trumpeting
sounding us forth in mid-July,
this music but beautiful.
Jim Bodeen
10 July 2023
AMONG THE COSMIC AUDIENCE
We hear the bell ring
drinking coffee on the porch
and we look around
as we go back to small talk
asking where did it come from
And now it’s ringing
over our heads, it’s our bell
and it’s not the wind
music from the universe
spider-swing from gutter to clapper
We can’t get enough
of the song, this porch music
holds us enveloped
Sunday morning absorbed, God-held
in a house of bell ringers
One sits before this
wonder-spun one doesn’t know
One doesn’t question
Days later buying groceries
birds follow us in the store
This ringing spider-bell
releases music
from the burden of beauty.
Jim Bodeen
2-5 July 2023
"We hear the bell ringing on the porch--"
THE BELL RINGING SPIDER
Gutter to clapper
Spider swings winging its web
composing for its prey
music from the universe
Cosmic audience us two
Jim Bodeen
2 July 2023
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