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