(BUT. BUT) (NOT SAID) (DON’T READ OUT LOUD)
If I am quiet enough
I can hear
everything that is said
I don’t even have to be quiet
So many languages
Karen speaks to me in color
in fabric
After she listens
She wraps me in squares of cotton
Jim Bodeen
25 October 2024
THE NEW NOTE CARDS
He puts an envelope
into the margin of the book
where he wants to begin. To hold it.
He’s written title and author’s name
on a slip of paper, cut to fit,
and he puts that below the passage.
He learned to make note cards
in junior high school 65 years ago.
A scrap of paper has room
for the page number.
He will take his Iphone
and photograph this portion
of the page. He can make
postcards from the image.
He may write something,
a poem, a prayer,
or, simply send it
as it was made, in an email.
Jim Bodeen
23 October 2024
SOMETHING COME FROM THE NOTHING
IN LEFTOVERS, DAY-MAKING IN THE TEMPLE
WHERE I’M COMING FROM WORLD COMPOSING
for Klyd Watkins
Waking before the mean time
timeless in the dreaming a kind of timing
and practice, and before the quiet requests
of the toes for movement, the compost
works its warmer ways into those other
extremities of wonder. Yesterday’s cut
peonies, turned once, have had nearly 24 hours
to settle in to dark spaces of revolving
black plastic. These first images of waking
arrive before altered shadow dark ones,
all part of the great messy mix. My friend
laughs his love for me in a poem commenting
on my age, time to turn to other thoughts,
and the 6-inch sliding doors, such
narrow access for the comings and goings
of the world composing itself such
deep down things. These and other
soil-making thoughts disturbing
this morning. Such tiny movement,
you’d think I might be a Feldenkreis
instructor, saying, Go slower. Two
new books (and old books) arrived
and sent. The new from Tennessee,
from Klyd—Feathers, and his own poems,
What Charlie Pride and Ray Acuff Talked About
Before Singing. Klyd is all sound country.
Hear that? Sound country. When he asked
me for feather poems I didn’t have any.
Now I wish I did, what I wrote him. Last week,
maybe longer, turning compost
(in the North Park of the garden)
where the temple is, I remembered
Snyder and his buddies talking about
the horrible garb doctors wear.
What should they wear? One asked
Snyder, they’d been talking about
Mountains and Rivers Forever.
Feathers, he said. Feathers,
they all repeated laughing. Then,
walking with Karen after Feathers
came in the mail, one feather
stops me on the sidewalk, this
bright orange shaft. But beautiful.
Some call this the rachis, this orange stem.
Look, I say to Karen.
This pure orange. And here’s two more,
she says picking them up. I photographed
them in her hands with my Iphone.
Those doctors. Doctors in feathers.
That’s a poem right there. Feathers
go into composts too. Not these.
These feathers go in the mail to Klyd.
Maybe they’ll be book marks, or cairns.
He might use the quills for writing.
Feathers in compost are 90% protein,
15% nitrogen, classified as green.
The science of protein in the form
of keratin, a fiber, is heavy reading.
The feathers in my hand don’t come
from poultry, however. I worry
they might have come from the kill
of the neighborhood cat lurking from
beneath some tree. Banana peels,
cardboard, coffee grounds, carrots.
All of it with falling leaves coming
in this mid-October week and last grasses.
Too much green soon turns to too much
brown, all of it delighting my politics,
my stand. I will make soil. I will get dirty.
This morning there are 26 days before the election.
Baseball playoffs before the World Series,
another source of medicine. What Klyd says
regarding that talk between Acuff and Pride
before the song? They were talking
about baseball. I don’t even know
if they voted. We do know they
were surrounded by bad politics,
and that baseball is a vaccine.
The thing about composting is the listening.
When you’re in there, when you open those bins,
you know everything is included. Everything.
The whole mix. Word comes like that.
Putting something together is dictionary.
Putting something together, like song,
or poem or prayer. Everything you can’t
see goes in. Especially things you can’t see.
Things you don’t even know about go in.
You can’t see it, but you can hear it.
You kind of can. Everything becomes
available for something else you don’t
know about. Right here. Here
might be the place to end this
whatever it is, and grab a shovel.
But it’s not the end either, it’s like
last Saturday, I went to Fruit City
in Union Gap and loaded up.
I bought the smallest of the large cabbages.
It was morning. It was another beginning.
And this cabbage.
Fourteen pounds. Big cabbage. It’s own wonder.
Soup, slaw, sauerkraut. Some for neighbors,
yes. And truth be told, some of it for compost
as much as the kitchen table. Some of this cabbage
for making soil from dirt. A kind of vote
for planet Earth.
Jim Bodeen
9-11 October 2024
BEGINNING THE STUDY OF THE PRESENT
After cycling, the coffee. After
cycling, Karen and coffee. After the lonely
night with Bonhoeffer, sunshine,
and Karen says, “Should we go get our shots?”
Yes, Let’s go. Flu and Covid. I carry
two copies of Harper’s—two essays
I read separately, ending summer, beginning
fall, each read twice, and a third time
at the pharmacy, 22 days before the election.
Yesterday’s Men, the Death of the Mythical
Method by Alan Jacobs, and Glimmers
of Totality, on Fredric Jameson at 90,
by Mark Greif, spelling correct. Quick
note: Jameson just died, on the third, after
a fall. Yesterday’s men, mine really, our
generation—Northrop Frye, Joseph Campbell--
didn’t know Giam Battista Vico, writing in 1725--
shorten the reign of barbarism. Jameson’s a Marxist,
his two characteristics of America: hypocritical
and shallow. After the second read,
transferred favorite sentences to notebook,
downloaded the e-book (couldn’t wait):
Inventions of a Present: The Novel
in its Crisis of Globalization. Here’s a sentence
from Greif: “Every intervention, rereading,
and retrospection by Jameson is about the present
and the wish to shape the future.” Our pharmacy’s
still locally owned, believe that? Karen takes
both shots in her left arm, and I take mine
in the right. Tieton Village Pharmacy. We’ve
known the pharmacist for years. Two years ago
when we had Covid at Christmas, he got us
going with Paxlovid. Karen quit after two pills.
I asked our guy to talk about virus and bacteria,
both in the context of Covid and composting.
“It’s been years since I had a microbiology class,”
he says, “bacteria’s more complex in cell structure.”
I just want to know how the worms get into the compost.
From Tieton we stop at Ace on our way home.
Karen wants purple and orange LED lights
for the porch during Days of the Dead.
White neighborhoods coming from Halloween
and commercial costume parties are catching up,
especially with skeletons—aka calaveras,
in the dominant culture in our town. I’m not
the Stage Manager. North America’s importing
ten-foot skeletons that fill lawns and houses--
no places to store these bones so large
there’s no place to store them. One neighbor
dresses hers according to the seasons. No one
knows the ancestors here, and to take them down
she’d have to take bedrooms from her children.
Skeletons come from computers don’t eat first.
How could these people ever tell a story?
Karen’s anxious to get back to her quilt.
Let me tell you what happened last night.
That night read with Bonhoeffer: Living
in community. “Whoever cannot stand being
in community should never live alone.”
A year like this.
Just after 2, my arms reach out, she’s gone.
Karen, I shout from bed. “I had an idea,”
she says from the other room. “I want to put
the chain fence behind Chuck’s portrait.”
Chuck’s a baseball coach. Women’s Fast Pitch
at the college. A memorial quilt. His wife died.
He brought by a stack of jerseys his arms
couldn’t hold. Karen’s been dreaming this
documentary into art for five months.
“You’re going to put a chain around Chuck?
How is that a vision?” Now we’re both up
walking around fabric. My brother’s
coached baseball for half a century.
How the day starts from dreaming. From
Jameson. Jameson’s goal: If you want to be
a fully dialectical thinker, you can’t be satisfied
with just the statement of one side.”
Nearly the size of a bedspread, Karen says
Chuck can never put it there. “He has dogs,”
This must be hung, it’s a statement about time.
Jameson’s voice is one of courage, implacable,
“...aware of the degree to which radical
efforts of late capitalism have been
conservative and traditionalist.”
Converted and re-functioned.
“He Names the System We’re Still Fighting,”
His obituary in The Nation headlines.
The Marxist is never safe he learns
after he champions a writer who turns
him into the FBI. “For, to be sure," Jameson writes in
Inventions of a Present, “our bodies themselves
are sick and poisoned with all the industrial waste
of the market civilization, which we relive
in the taste in our mouths…” And no one is better
his obituary states, than Jameson. He remains.
Today is National Indigenous Day,
and despite her fame, America doesn’t know
the Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. How could it recognize
her poem, Remember, when put on Facebook?
22 billion dollars is what it will cost Los Angeles
to end homelessness in a decade, L.A. Times reports.
45,000 homeless in the city. 29,000 unsheltered.
Less than 7 billion budgeted. Some want less expensive
strategies. In Seattle, Danny Westneat reports
in the Seattle Times that the Hope Factory’s tiny homes
sit empty where they’re built, 500 of them hammered
by volunteers, sent out as “colorful, 100-square foot
missionaries to get people off the ground.”
No one has a straight answer, he reports. Some like them
too much. Some call them shacks in Shantytowns.
The Hope Factory. In Yakima we have Camp Hope,
and tonight is our turn to serve dinner. Pulled pork
sandwiches, barbecue sauce, cole slaw, home-made
cupcakes. West Coast homelessness. Camp Hope
dinners in the army green tent. Marion tells me
to watch how much slaw I load on my spoon
as we’re expecting more people due to cold
weather. Sunny and beautiful, but cold.
Covid shots, flu shots, egg shells in compost
aids photosynthesis, strengthen cell walls in plants.
Jim Bodeen
14-16 October 2024
HE SHOWS HIS GRANDDAUGHTER
THE COMPOST BINS ON SATURDAY
He had been out of garbology
since he left the mountain retreat village
that broke everything down. Now
that he was back into it
he remembered cardboard
counted as brown. He would
bring himself up to speed.
His own composting,
Put something together,
from Old French,
make plant manure, he tells her,
and she looks at him
to show she didn’t understand.
Plant shit, he says,
and she smiles.
It’s kind of a honey bucket.
You brought this pizza
in a cardboard carton.
Wet it in the sink and it’s soft
enough to tear in 20 minutes.
It goes into the compost
tomorrow on top of the grass.
This makes our planet younger.
Cardboard counts as brown.
Jim Bodeen
12 October 2024
THREAD OF CREATION
HEART CENTER DREAMING
--for Karen
Any glimpse enough
Making documents of cloth
Around weathered arms
Anywhere to anywhere
Unleashing real existence
Jim Bodeen
12 October 2024
LOOKING THROUGH BOTH SETS OF EYES
What do
others do
when everything--
I mean, the only one one’s ever loved
disappears behind swinging doors
Walk the hallways
Look at the art on the walls
Write in the notebook
Any of it can bring trouble
What I saw
she never could
It helped me see
what I couldn’t see
through the alternative
lens—then again,
and later, to see
with ordinary eyes
what I’d seen under
medicine’s dizziness.
Ordinariness of the third eye
Third ear listening
Jim Bodeen
2 October 2024
DRIVING TO ELLENSBURG ON I-90
TO STUDY BONHOEFFER WITH STEVE
BEFORE THE 2024 ELECTION
--for Steve Hill
Driving home he says these things
come up on his phone every day--
I get the last one: What good shall I do?
This thing called grace, the cheap one,
what we talk about. Steve’s catalogue
built from yard sales, a garden with no
white space, surrounded
(immersed?) by the homeless
(and every homeless plant
re-planted) is a catalogue of things
to do daily advocating for those
living in tents, sleeping under tarps.
Shopping carts, dogs, doorway
urinals, letters to city hall, nothing
eliminated from Steve’s agenda.
You don’t go off the handle,
ever? Nope.
What would that do? The book
in his bag, today, Trash.
But I thought you were reading Bonhoeffer?
Steve is costly grace. Steve has
his twenty people, it’s such a small
circle, he says, walking me through
his compost system, from kitchen
waste to aged-top
soil, showing me how his sprinklers
keep things moist. Here pick
some figs, he says. This is Cedar
Monroe’s poor white journey, Trash.,
still deep suffering to attend to,
still much work to be done,
Steve handing Monroe’s book
to me in the car, paraphrasing
his own neighborhood full of color,
and poor whites: 66 million poor
whites in America: If you are housed,
or at least a verbal agreement to live somewhere…
Pastor Monroe. His cross on his desk:
We are not trash. The systems that kill us
are trash, his epilogue his anthem. Steve’s
got his hat on, his suspenders,
in cutoffs, looking at a boarded up
Victorian house as we drive
neighborhoods: Wouldn’t it be fun
to get that house and a bunch of kids
and fix it up! Bonhoeffer knows
deeply, he knows, how the Gospel
gets turned into its opposite through
such easy moves. How does Jesus
read scripture! So interesting.
Where do you begin?
The way Steve opens his phone--
Names what he’s grateful for,
three things, asks, What good shall
I do today, saying
Good things will happen.
One can’t be Christian and nationalist.
Answer your own questions.
Jim Bodeen
20 September-1 October 2024
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