2PM MONDAY

 

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 30^th 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