WESTBERG TRAIL NEAR ELLENSBURG

 

WESTBERG TRAIL NEAR ELLENSBURG

When one has walked a long way to reach the turning in the path that discloses an anticipated view, and that view appears, there is always a vibration of the landscape. It is repeated in the walker’s body. The harmony of the two presences, like two strings in tune, each feeding off the vibration of the other, is like an endless relaunch.

           --Frédérick Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

The wrestling teacher at the high school

ran his wrestlers here, Phil says. This one’s

Hike of the Month for new Cascadians,

and I’m new. Phil says, I’ll sweep.

Stephanie will lead. If you go off trail

leave your pack by the side. Phil’s

in his 80s, and I’m the newbie, 78.

Karen doesn’t want me alone on trails.

Barry gave me the Walking book at coffee,

Notice the article, ‘A’, in the title.

I’m carrying 13 essentials, but don’t

include map or compass. Turn left on

Umtanum Road coming in to E-burg

drive past Irene Rinehart Park, drive

to Manastash Park in Wenas Wildlife Area.

Not much more than two miles to summit

looking over town and college, about

800 feet elevation gain. I finished

at the college here, when I came back

from Viet Nam, August, 1968,

Karen and I married in November,

looking back at January, 1969.

There’s the River we floated as newlyweds.

My first graduate class

with Irene Rinehart’s husband.

Karen got a job at the bank

after our son was born

and I couldn’t find a job.

Beauty in these barren hills.

Moisture brings out the odors.

Buckwheat flowers white, belong with Knotweed,

not wheat at all, related to sorrel and rhubarb.

An everyday hike for Ellensburg people.

Looking back remembering some

who switched out bewilderment for vision.

I’m taking notes on Sunday’s church bulletin

as we walk, Edge-Walking. Borde/Sendero.

written alongside Psalm 145,

I will exalt you, my God, and praise your name.

I’ve got a new name, too, Edge Walker,

one I share with others, and my translation

into Spanish, Borde/Sendero, hyphenated.

Chama, my Argentinian friend says,

You can’t put two nouns together in Spanish.

We’re reading Borges together.

It’s a thin trail, but more than animal tracks.

Borde at the edge. Sendero both walker and trail.

Liminal existence, Chama, We stop for water.

On a scrap of paper I write Borde/Sendero.

More than a trail name. A Blessingway

from the Diné, Navajo. Walking as we walk.

Looking back into the town, I’m searching

for something more—the man

who became the Godfather of our daughters.

Edge walker is the name given to me by friends,

borde, lugar fértil, rico en diversidad.

Thin, delgado. Walking, caminando.

A post at the summit surrounded by rocks.

Someone’s pinned a photo of Guadalupe,

an ammo box placed under a bush

with a notebook for hikers to sign, includes

a shot glass and playing cards.

How one gets anywhere.

Ways of accompaniment.

Ones I carry weigh nothing.

How I was carried. These trekking poles

adjust for the way down, absorbing

the body, turns me into a four-legged.

This solitary walking with others.

Jim Bodeen

26-29 September 2023

KAREN'S UNFINISHED OBJECTS

 

KAREN’S UNFINISHED OBJECTS

I.

First the tablecloth

Search cut fabric quilt vision

An eye to something

II. LIVING ROOM RESCUE

Unfinished objects

Leftovers make Blessingway

Candle path temple

Jim Bodeen

17 September 2023

BACK YARD UNDER BIRCHES

 

BACK YARD UNDER BIRCHES

White paper bark Jacquemontes

this garden holding me, September

side-light sunshine, birds.

Neighbor cat climbs the white plastic fence

back home, geese bounding

their displacement honk.

Ajedrez, Reloj de arena,

poemas de Borges. Doctor’s

appointment canceled.

Medicine, too, in lockdown.

Chess and hourglass. House picked

up. Inside-clean. Vacuumed

corners on knees Last night

we re-hung Karen’s quilts.

Karen going for coffee.

So beautiful here, Van sings

in my head, so quiet.

Just enough birds and bird calm.

This garden, these trees.

Last night serving food at Camp Hope,

two granddaughters with Karen and I.

One man asking Karen, What church?

Discovers he’s been sleeping in Church gardens.

It’s scary in there, he tells Karen.

Noisy, voices. I thought it’d be quiet.

What do you grow?

Flowers and trees. You were under

rhododendrons it sounds like.

A Mexican family stands by the door

of the dinner tent. Hamburgesa

is what I call the Sloppy Joes.

Sammie and Dee serve cole slaw, green beans.

Where in Mexico, I ask the kids.

Aguililla, they say. So many from there

over a half century. So many former

students. Some of them teachers now.

Jose, Alberto. Friends of our kids,

students, colleagues, friends,

¿Estan en escurela, aquí?

Sí, en Wapato.¿Le gusta?

Sí.

Ponga atención. Aprendan leer, escribir.

Mis nietas hablan español.

¿De veras.?

Sammie gives me that look.

I only know how to name some fruits.

After dinner Sam finds a baby bottle

someone left behind. I know the family

whose baby left this behind, she says.

She and Dee go out looking for them in camp.

Camp Hope. They find the family,

exchange laughter. I’m watching

from the dinner tent, seeing this again,

under the birches. Borges looking

at me from the book’s spine.

Azar in the middle of dust and nothing.

Fate, luck, chance, walking

between polvo and nada.

Borges is a Blessingway singer.

Navajo, hozho, celebrating

La Maestria de Dios, who,

in magnificent irony,

me dio a la vez los libros y la noche.

Those kids at Camp Hope like it here.

They like school. All poems son dones,

as Williams said, as Borges worked with.

Nothing but the poem, Williams wrote.

I have been singing him to myself over the duration.

Borges at table, tablero,

at chess, threading sand through the hourglass,

struck and pierced in the mirror.

El espejo of myself. Borges delivers

the poem in the way that grammar

gives me confidence to walk free.

Free will even in its limitations.

Albedrió before me.

¿Qué dios detrás de Dios?

The man writing in his notebook,

whether at prayer or worship,

raises his hands as if they were branches.

Jim Bodeen

12 September 2023

KAIROS

 

KAIROS

Twice today I have been 15 minutes early

to places where I am supposed to be at.

Currently, can you feel the water running,

I am waiting out front West Valley High School

for my granddaughter, Samantha, 16,

to come out from class at 11 o’clock,

so that I will transport her to the Skills Center

where she’s enrolled in the Culinary Arts Program

for the rest of the afternoon. Twice this week

students have prepared chicken recipes

and once, they’ve sauteed vegetables.

Friday they’ll test for foot safety certification.

Earlier this morning I stopped at Johnson’s Orchards

for peaches, paying $1.25 per pound for fresh-picked

slightly under-sized peaches, their regular peaches,

recognized, flown all over the world, selling for $2.99.

The young owner alerts me to these

seeing me in the secondary-size bin.

My granddaughter has already passed

her driving test, but needs to have been signed-up

for six months prior to obtaining her license,

and that time period will have been met after next week.

My assistance in transporting her is temporary.

This is good grandpa work, reading in the car.

“Hitler came in through the ballot box.”

Like that. In a paragraph two-and-a-half pages long,

Jenny Erpenbeck writes in Kairos, translated in 2023

into English by Michael Hoffman, writing in German,

and published in 2021. See page 235.

Between the times of early arriving

I’ve had an hour at home to read.

I’m attracted to time, chronological, eternal—the other one.

A student. And Erpenbeck whose work I know,

steadies me in anxious times.

Erpenbeck would have no control over placement

on the page, but the writer knew what she was about,

its appearance in the balancing middle of the longest

paragraph in her story.

To that point, manipulation

by Katharina’s lover has disgusted me--

Would I finish the book? Now I am woke.

Mentored early by an Icelandic Shaman

in a Lutheran collar, I had access to other time

by dropping into the poem.

Aim beyond the kairos, archer,

weave like the soccer player exploding with the ball.

How do you practice?

Katharina’s lover, directs her

with cassette tapes, writes books.

But Erpenbeck gives him Holderlin, Brecht, Weill.

At 17, before the Icelandic Shaman appears,

a week before enrolling in the Christian university,

he bought a red sports car, finding himself in a junior college classroom

reading Bertolt Brecht.

Oh, the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear

And it shows them pearly white

Just a jackknife has old MacHeath, babe

the older teacher shaking his head, no,

This is not Bobby Darin.

How it goes, Kurt Vonnegut. Welcome to Dresden.

Tenderness is decisive, Father Boyle says,

writing about the homies. “Only tenderness keeps us

attentive to delight. It’s not about arriving at ‘nice.’

Tenderness is radicalized nice. It is the finishing

touch in love.”

Later, in the classroom, a teacher,

looking at the clock,

he would say to students,

the difference between the two,

might be to think about the good-night kiss

as the other kind of time.

My granddaughter gets 15 minutes to eat

between the time I pick her up, and get her to Culinary Arts.

I will pick her up in two hours and take her home.

This takes time, too. Time taking its time. Time away, too.

Time’s back and forth chronology, with its tiny flashes

of the other, opening me.

I do my bicycle miles

in wind and woke. Also, from the dreaming.

Hozho, hold me to the standard. Why does the dream

tell me to say, Ulysses is Lord, repeating itself,

until I turn on the light and write it down?

This is the Blessingway.

Karen scoffs at my suggestion

over coffee to retrieve the walker for her,

assuring me it does nothing for her balance.

She’s back at her machine, sewing,

a new tablecloth and a darker, patterned, Americana.

Her threads weave time while oil spatters,

as I saute onions and green peppers

prior to adding chicken for fajitas.

The early baseball game on TV, Karen’s quilted fabric,

swirl with garlic and onions in a single room.

Labor Day in America and tomorrow a grandson

turns 18. Karen has designed the card

and included my short poem for his birthday,

he, whose pickup carries quivers of fishing poles

proclaiming his arrival as a man as he heads to the river.

I finish Greg Boyle’s Whole Language,

Power in Extravagant Tenderness reading on the porch.

Boyle spoke here, in our town.

I know the beautiful man’s voice, his repetition

from John’s Gospel, So that you may be one.

Truth brings us to witness he says.

So much medicine in warehouses.

Father Gregorio is the peach I cut into Karen’s oatmeal

this morning. Living simultaneity.

I can count refugees but not measure them.

Women pass the word on home deliverance.

Praise for word of mouth, now, Jenny Diver.

Karen, come over here and lie with me.

Steady the day laying out material on our table. Such cloth.

Such clothing and cover. Time-being.

Colors manifesting without transition.

Jim Bodeen

2-5 September 2023

WAITING FOR THE DOOR TO OPEN

 

WAITING FOR THE DOOR TO OPEN

0845 hours

Outside Johnson Orchards

waiting for 9 am opening after coffee

with B, M, D,

Fresh Produce

August peaches, nectarines, plums

on the first day of September

Rain last night

Muscles sore from raking thatch

in yard yesterday, not

just leg muscles

Hands sore, arthritic, pulled-out

Filled that yard bin though

M’s are in NY

playing Mets interleague,

Here’s September baseball.

Karen’s sewing today

at Harmon Center

making a table cloth

Before I left for coffee

I mad her lunch

Ham and havarti cheese sandwich

with butter on wheat bread

One chocolate chip cookie

and a handful of pretzels

in the same baggie

along with a cup of yogurt

The only plastic spoon

in the drawer left over

from Vietnamese takeout pho

Johnson’s Orchards

Same family, same location,

since 1901. I’m looking

for some peaches for tonight

The two Lindas, Chama,

coming for tacos, beans and rice

Peaches and ice cream

It must be just about 9 am

There is simply no accounting for Karen’s love

This poem’s written

and my bladder’s filling up

When I check the time on my phone

I see that it’s 8:53

which means, by my math,

this poem took eight minutes to compose

That word, compose, now

Carefully chosen after eliminating write

without a second thought

Jim Bodeen

1 September 2023