Storypath/Cuentocamino: : OTHER STAIRS, AND OTHER STAIRCASES

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

OTHER STAIRS AND STAIRCASES

And your stairway reaches up to the moon

Van Lose Stairway, Van Morrison

Here, there are two. Hospital staircases.

The Grand and the Values.

The Notebook finds them early

while Karen’s in surgery—Med

evac’d last night over the mountains.

I follow the crescent moon over the mountains

in my car. What’s this, I ask

myself seeing stairs through the open

door beside the elevator. Walk

through stars when you can. Entering

through ER after midnight, Security walks me

to my wife’s room, where Anthony,

night nurse brings me chair

and blanket, sleepless in altered state,

coffee from the nurse’s pot. The open

Notebook knows its practice, walking

me to two stenciled words over the door:

Our Values. This is level II, and I’m descending--

wall on my left hand-painted, Respect,

brush stroke, flourish, followed by,

eight steps later, Integrity.

I’m stopping at one, writing,

walking back up. Integrity,

Respect, these steps, concrete,

are for healers, and I’m

ascending, following the notebook,

filling in the medicine: Excellence,

Collaboration, differing brush strokes

in the middle: Our Values,

Stewardship, Kindness--

the Values Staircase at Good Samaritan

has taken me in, sleepless, altered

walk, writing, breath prayer,

not reverie, a kind of vertigo

that a pen on a notebook page

trusts. And here’s another

stairs, with a brass plate, labeled Grand,

varnished and curving hand rails.

The Grand, as you would imagine,

your hand attracted to the burnished

dark rail, warm and rich. Marble steps

and an overlook where one can look back

into the entrance and framed photographs

of donors and the Board of Trustees.

The gift shop behind glass doors

is on your right, and to be honest

I didn’t find this one right away

and yes, this is the one that gets me

in trouble, stumbling main entrance,

the woman with identification

around her neck, spotting the notebook,

asking, Where do you belong? Where

is your wrist band?

I’m not in trouble, exactly,

...but where did you sleep?

This is a hospital, and America

is a dangerous place.

Will I be sent to a motel?

The temporary wrist band

walks me to art that transports

all of us in and out of margins.

Icicle Creek, frozen outside of Wenatchee

where we danced and said salmon prayers

with natives and poets from Alaska

through Canada altering my vision

years ago, and Karen is in surgery,

and this painting of Icicle Creek stops me

perhaps the surgeon’s knife slicing the groin

now, as I look into pools of water

beside large boulders, less than an inch,

accessing the vein

for the catheter heading to her heart

where it will deploy the pacemaker.

I don’t know this, looking at Icicle Creek

frozen paint, salmon-filled, recalling

native salmon elder-told stories decades

back. A man torn open

walking halls with an open notebook

being held by poets and artists,

healed by ancient medicines

life-sustained by technology

that bewilders me daily.

A robot delivering medicines

passes me in the hall. Walker,

caminante. Packing a tooth

brush for the night drive

to follow Karen, I pick the poet

Machado for accompaniment:

Caminante, son tus huellas

el camino, y nada más.

Walk with the open notebook.

Water waves—estelas, wake,

vigilia velorio. Walker. Rostro,

sendero, pista, recorrido. That fast

to John 17:8: Now they know

that everything you have given

me is from you. How things

happen—Father Greg Boyle

before me in a church pew

So that we may be one.

Home boys, catheters and bow ties.

Two doctors, William Chardack and Andrew Cage,

wearing bow ties, connect a dog’s heart

to a pacemaker in 1958. Two years later,

the bow tie team implant a pacemaker

in a 77-year old man with complete blockage

who will live for two years before dying

from natural causes. Two men

in bow ties. Cardiac pacemakers span

centuries. Luigi Galvani discovers

the muscles of dead frogs’ legs twitch

when struck by an electrical spark--

The bow tie team coming through

time following electrical sparks in frog legs

come from Basho hearing the frog,

plop, splash in water, walking.

[On our first date, I take Karen to a play,

Try to remember, and follow.

The poems of e.e. cummings.

I carry her senior picture

with the stacked hair to Viet Nam.]

The Van Lose Stairway, it reaches

up to the moon. It’s art on hospital walls.

Send me your Bible. Send me your Gita--

words I sing wrong for decades.

glass jars for Good Will, jelly, Karen

The Notebook stops me before a shield.

Once, in our middle age, cleaning out

the garage, practicing triage? sorting

says, No, Save that one! startling me

Karen, it’s a jelly jar for Christ’s sake!

Sleeping on it for days, and then,

in the garden, God-listening, God

giving. After the losses,

as a child, Karen—Were there things

that had to go that you just couldn’t bear?

Something you remember? In the basement

in our house on 46^th, in Ballard,

there was one corner—everything,

there were trunks, and chests,

and everything was my mother’s,

that’s all I knew. And I never looked inside.

Gold paints and all the swirling yellows

into clouded shadows created by a single petal,

you can see the brush strokes. Brush stroked

petals and into the pistil—back out

to a touch of sky. This is the Clock

for the Long Now. A man looks into white

water on Icicle Creek. Deep pools

and a fishing rod, water swirling salmon

room-sized boulders. Henner Schroder’s

Turtle Clan Paddle Dancers,

Sand-casted. A full planet dancing.

Blue seas circumscribing the dance,

like Achilleus’ Shield in the Iliad.

Here’s a reflection--pics of water and sky

hung behind a parking lot of mobile gurneys.

Stretcher parking. I walk outside,

through the rose garden to the blue tables

circumscribed by multi-stemmed trunks.

I set my notebook and Machado down,

pull up a blue chair wondering, Who

planted these trees? How are they called?

Later, I’ll ask the woman at the entrance

for their names and she’ll tell me she’s

asked that all the time. Why aren’t they

labeled in brass plates I ask her.

Are you kidding? This is multi-care!

She says. Seriously, I love my job!

They’re Katsuras. With heart-shaped

leaves. Identified by an Iphone

Footstep hallway walking. Miles of doorways.

The GPS system that takes me over mountains

and through the city at night. Hallway art

and two staircases. A two-hour surgery.

Two nights in a notebook. Monks

and wandering poets following

the crescent moon, while Karen sleeps.

Anthony, the nurse, covering me with a blanket,

and sleepless in my altered state, lost

and looking for coffee, with my notebook,

the other one appears beside the elevator.

I know where elevators go

but I am led by the notebook and footsteps,

and the door is open.

Cement steps

painted words on walls, brush strokes

giving way to the words, levels up and down,

one in the middle naming itself—this is

Our Values Stairway, reaching

up to the moon, my values falling upward

Richard Rohr, or the other way,

painted words elevate the man going down,

back out to art-filled walls,

so much water, and boats

liminal, like ones carrying Tu Fu

into Triple Gorge and poems

of the immortals. A Glass triptych

triggers them setting out in their boats.

The hospital is meandering water.

Tu Fu ties up on Yellow River

flowing to aboriginal stars,

this one, Well Rope, night

shot into Star River, the Milky Way.

and I’m walking it up and down,

its four levels not for the workout

but for the words. The Stairway

reaches to the garden walk-around,

through roses, to the sculpture framing

the hospital high rise housing

the medicine and the medics,

housing the art. The garden leads

to other things, too, the blue tables

tucked beneath the circle of multi-stemmed

trees—What are they? What are they?

multi-stemmed Katsuras. Shaping,

a stadium of trees Dr. Williams opens

for me in asphodels, Flossie wheels

Karen out of surgery back

to her room only in the poem half-smiling,

looks at me, looks at Karen,

and the screen monitoring

every heart in the room, saying,

Look at that Pacemaker

go to work. This is footwork.

Between time, walking liminal steps

descending, half-rest in each step

the only outcome God allows,

no guarantees, muffled

saxophone distortion, the notebook

it’s own weather report, trouble

making god of amplified wonder.

Jim Bodeen

10 May—17 July 2024

●

UNTITLED

These are the loneliness steps

of the back stairway. These

are the steps I walk to work

Take the door

off from the kitchen

Jim Bodeen

18 September 2024

●

BOATS ON HOSPITAL WALLS

[While the beloved is in surgery, the man stands in front of a triptych of fused glass called Healing Hands * Caring Heart, by the artist Richard La Londe. The Triptych is a gift to Good Samaritan Hospital, Puyallup, Washington from the artist, and was installed in 2005.]

--an empty journey on that Star River raft

..and immortals set out again in their boat.

Autumn Thoughts, Tu Fu, trans. By David Hinton

I. A hand pulls back a sea-green curtain

The curtain is a waterfall

a river fish jumping white water

to the ocean. Morning sun fish

before outstretched eagle wings

above it all Star River Milky Way breath

breathing cloud breath birthing

below it all

boat water birth canal

hand-held pouring water forth

two-person boat

heads streaming electricity

hand-held horns

rocking on water

the two of them

the multiplicity

waves and hands

II. Cloud Breath River

winds around sun and mountain

snow-fed rivers like hands are hands

holding, housing hand-held water boat

palms up issuing sun-life water colors

hands underneath the boat

part-boat, part of the boat

two faces, three lidded eyes

one-eye issuing water force

back in, or from water, all ways

house and mountain

forested and radiant and rocking dream-held

III. Green waterfall curtain

held back, pulled back,

eyes uncertain on right side

eyes, three of them open

three hands head river holding

planet held by an upper hand

waterfall a kind of vestment

green gown

red heart hand drawn

blood filled those same green

oxygenated and unclear undefined

Jim Bodeen

11 May-14 June 2024

●

CODA:

This is the Values Stairway

This is the Wall of Words

Here’s John Bott’s Circle of Friends—Watercolor

Emanuel Paniagua’s Butterfly--

Do you see the four chambers of the heart?

Oil on paper

Oh! the labyrinth! Can we walk the labyrinth?

This is, this is, this is more than a day’s journey

II.

Help me

Don’t hurt me

Be kind to me

III.

Values Staircase Coda Revisit with Two Karens

Then I entered through the Emergency Room

ER, baby

Today we’re walking through the front door.

That must be the Grand Staircase.

●

So Karen B and I drIve over and back on Tuesday. Karen Sch, AKA Dr. Sch and I meEt for lunch in cafeteria. Dr. Sch says, “I never had one day of fun at this place in three years.” And she had walked these Values Stairsteps (the back way, the staff way—chipped paint, worn rails, cement ((with values on the walls))--what I saw—what she never did) pretty magical, I think, for us all. Karen B. Didn’t make the full tour, but had her own time in coffee shop. It both helped me see what I couldn’t see—and helped me see with ordinary eyes what I only saw with magical alternative odds the first time when Karen was in surgery. So I’m trying to make some beginning sense of that today.

●

EMANUEL PANIAGUA

Don’t know yet. Neither do I.

Don’t know. This visitation

wants to take another look.

A guided tour of sorts. The role

of healing in halllways

while the beloved opens

for the knife in God’s otherness.

I had thought this once,

never having come for fun,

Did you see his name? The artist’s?