ONE DAY MY PHONE RINGS,
“You’re busted,” she says.
It’s a woman from Yakima, who belongs to the medical community.
“You’re busted, she repeats.
“You’re picture’s on the front page
of the Navajo Times.
She’s accusing me of violating
COVID-19 protocols.
The Navajo nation is 97 per cent vaccinated,
I respond.
So are we.
Jim Bodeen
20 August 2021–17 January 2022
*
OPENING LINES IN A NEW NOTEBOOK
for Lloyd Draper in the Cañon del Muerto
The way I hear the song, Lloyd,
you’re the Blessingway. Listen,
He comes upon me with blessing.
Before him, from there.
That’s how it happened in Chinle.
That’s how the song goes.
One more verse, same song:
Behind him, it is blessed.
Before him, it is blessed.
What happened in the restaurant.
Poems are letters to family and friends.
The notebook will receive all you have.
Your friend in the Yakima Canyon,
Jim
25 October 2021
DEEP TRAVEL JOY, A POST CARD
TIP TO THE JOURNALIST RAPPELING
INTO CAÑON DEL MUERTO BY CHAIN
for Cindy Yurth, Navajo Times
Here’s Karen’s work, threads on threads.
Karen in color, cloth-colored new each day,
ready for What else? any weather. Patches
filling beauty-eyes in blessingway. Holding
what won’t be held. Unsuspecting
combinations. She wraps warmth
into the hidden image. Brings light
to solstice, balancing all that’s dark
in story. Fabric is her lead.
She can bury it when necessary.
Christmas without a cross,
bearing the needle’s light touch,
5 Ws packing foundation. Emanating
from Karen, a journalist’s essence.
Jim
Fall Equinox, 2021
FRIENDS IN ANOTHER CANYON
Bench made from 2x4s laid
over two tree stumps, new,
like the apple tree before us,
waiting for what we won’t see.
We imagine Lloyd Draper
as we know him, fleshed-out
Blessingway, holding a book,
wearing a mask, placing his tools
in the basement, sitting hermit-like
(his word) under an apple tree
at the far end of Cañon del Muerto.
With Frost and Dickinson,
poets he talks about at lunch.
He won’t settle on one spelling of Hozho,
laying out beauty in ways choices
steal sleep. He is who he says he is,
Geronimo-force to reckon with.
Jim Bodeen
8 October 2021
*
The Blessingway Notebook
|And Walking
The Mothership in the Summer of Fires
Jim Bodeen
Summer, 2021
OUT OF BISHOP, 168 EAST, 12 MILES
to the turnoff to Bristle Cone Pine Forest,
then another dozen miles to Grand View Park,
where we are now. I say to Karen writing down
fragments, Thanks for this, your notes,
for making this journey too. No power,
no company, no smoke, no fires. And
two nights.
Carrying lots of water, lots of fuel.
Tire pressure checked. Narrow road.
Here, a one-land road. If you think
your horn is going to be heard, Jim.
22 August 2021
Mothership Log 14-A
.JPG)
*
THE PURPLE PINE CONE
“Sunlight, rain, snow, air. Indeed, as we now know,
earth is made of heaven’s scattering of stardust…”
David Hinton, Existence, A Story
Back at the Mothership,
Karen shows me her photo:
It must have been a purple pine cone
at one time--I didn’t know
about purple pine cones
until now—I heard, I say,
couldn’t see, but...I just noticed
she says, it must have been
purple at one time, had to have been.
This darker color with sap running
out. This living. This, these.
Oldest trees in the world.
Karen and Jim Bodeen
Storypath/Cuentocamino
Mothership Log, 14-A
23 August 2021
*
EVERY TIME WE STOP THE MOTHERSHIP
WE HAVE TO WIPE THE TABLE OF DUST
LOTS OF ROAD PILING UP IN OUR SHEETS
So the children will know where
their grandparents are buried.
Driving into Chinle we follow
a local red pickup, whose riders show us
how to slow for caution. Crystal
clear guidance allowing
no dark opening.
Being and beauty’s highway.
Beauty in margins, margins
sharing road’s shoulders
with all those wild flowers.
Called by Navajo Blessingway Singer,
Frank Mitchell.
Setting up the morning at midnight,
notebook cruising, unguarded words wheeling.
The past week in wind,
seeming different, new and old,
like Karen’s breathing,
her breath as she sleeps,
her gift to me at night, waking.
How shall we know our grandparents?
Mothership a zendo dream machine.
Karen’s breath over time, a lifetime,
heavenly beautiful, belonging.
Old wagon out front.
Grandpa hauled freight like Frank Mitchell.
These childhood red wheels.
Beauty above, beauty below, circling.
Jim Bodeen
Chinle, Arizona
9 September 2021
THE SHIRT WITH BLOOD ON ITS HANDS
FOR MISSING AND MURDERED
INDIGENOUS WOMEN
My brother brings me this shirt
and says, Wear it tomorrow.
Looking at it, watching TV,
I say,
That’s a tough shirt to put on.
He looks at me, and asks,
Why is that?
Jim Bodeen
July 4, 2022
●
...this immediate experience of empty awareness
was the beginning place, that dwelling place here
in the beginning, free of thought and identity,
is where we are most fundamentally ourselves
...and reality logically begins.
David Hinton, Existence: A Story
A slower pace, a somewhat slower pace will do.
Of a sudden, should it start to rain,
let yourself get soaked.
An old friend, the rain.
Ko Un, Your Pilgrimage
Show me something that isn’t beautiful
and I’ll show you the veil over your eyes.
Lyla June Johnston, Dawn
●
BUT WHERE IT ALL BEGINS,
BACK THERE, WAY BACK,
BEFORE THE FIRES--
Before the fires there were already fires.
*
Mothership in Spanish.
¿Es la madre de necesitad.
Buque madre.
Embarcación madre
Buque nodriza
Leche materna
Barco para reportar
Nave principal.
How do you say this?
¿Como se llamen esta barca cósmica?
This cosmic ship.
*
These stones, these tiny stones of no great distinction.
Karen wakes. Looks at the stones.
“You built me a cairn,” she says.
She says, I only see boats arriving from the South.
From Canavaggio’s life of Cervantes:
Los bagnios, the slave prisons of North Africa.
Pasamaques, shoes.
Soldado aventajado, elite trooper.
El Manco de Lepanto—the one-handed veteran of Lepanto.
An entire florilegium of ancedotes surrounding the battle of Lepanto attests
to the legendary aura that quickly surrounded the event. And Cervantes: “He saw
everything, noted everything and put everything in its proper perspective....
Cervantes, a self-made man, explored the masterpieces of Italian literature
with the ardor of a person fond of reading even the scraps of paper in the streets.”
The Mothership.
I think constantly of cairns. Cairns in all sizes.
Mojón in Spanish.
Mi nave persona.
Mi nave personal.
Mi casa rodante.
La Toxica.
La mera Madriza.
La jefa de jefes.
La Madre de todas las barcas.
*
We are driving through fire in the American West.
We stop at Indian John Hill for a break.
Karen films the fire with her Iphone as we drive through.
Flames along the highway. Fire trucks from Yakima.
While billionaires joy ride in space,
my brother sends an email celebrating
Brother David’s 95th birthday. The Benedictine
Monk who I studied prayer with coming home
from Vietnam, reading Eliot’s Four Quartets
on a grass lawn in high summer,
the life of this dancing prayer of a man
and his invitation to caring
for one another and this beautiful planet.
●
BROTHER DAVID DANCES IN THE TEASEL,
urging us to sing, Come alive, Come alive,
Come alive and show you care. Are you going
to sing with me, Karen, giggling,
yes, coming alive as we sing
where the Mothership’s parked next
to the tow away sign. We are planning
a journey to see our son
who lives on a mountain
in the Eastern Sierras.
Karen will sew teasel into fabric
and I will hike with our son.
He is 50. I am 76.
He has been on the John Muir Trail.
He will show me.
Joy Harjo’s collection,
When the Light of the World Was Subdued,
Our Songs Came Through
open before me. It is 5 am
as I read Adrian Louis’ poem, Skinology,
ten stanzas of six lines each.
Lovelock Paiute, eldest of 12 children,
Once, I thought I saw eagles
soar, loop, and do the crow hop
in the blue air while the sun
beat the earth like a drum.
Louis was born in 1946,
(a year after me)
and died in 2018.
Fire hazard is extreme.
State Forest Service closed all lands
to recreation three days ago.
Mt. Rainier National Park remains open.
It’s safer on the Mountain, but change that damn name.
Louis begins his second stanza,
I have known some badass skins.
*
PREPARING FOR THE BLESSING WAY
HOZHÓ.
*
HOW WE DROVE THROUGH FIRE
HOW WE DROVE THROUGH FIRE
for the Blessingway. The living room
in Santa Fe, that summer Karen sewed landscapes
in Albuquerque, a room
full of women poets, Jane Lippman’s
on the back porch of the moon begins
reading dawn, Lyla June Johnston’s
grandmother’s voice in Dawn:
Show me something that isn’t beautiful
and I’ll show you the veil over your eyes--
become a mantra carrying me beyond
geography and time into great listening
where I’d been given, if not home,
a possible way, out and into, being,
Chinle, Blessingway, Hozhó.
Alerted, not registered, needing
Barry Lopez and his horizon
to give me the name,
Navajo singer, Ólta’ í tsoh,
Big Schoolboy, widely known
by his English name, Frank Mitchell,
buried in Chinle. Inter-library loans
enabled me to read over three summers.
I would record, and not know,
David P. McCallistar, Charlotte J. Frisbie,
returning the story each time
to university libraries, until receiving
my own from library storage in Walla Walla.
But still not permission from family.
Why not call Navajo Times in Chinle?
Karen says. Sometime relatives will respond.
And that’s what happens. Grandchildren
from Eastern Washington and Phoenix email
permission to put flowers
on their grandparents’ graves.
Rose and Frank Mitchell.
Cindy Yurth will pick up the phone, clearing wax
from my ears, taking me to lunch in Chinle
with Lloyd Draper, if not accessing his orchard
descending a chain in Cañon de Chelly.
Now we would hear again of Covid.
This is the time of the new plague,
and a new outbreak on the Reservation,
5750 cases in Chinle. Curfew at ll pm.
Shelter at home. And our plan honoring
the singer would be canceled--
diverted instead to see out son in the Sierras,
driving through fires, then, perhaps, Chinle,
and new information, 91% vaccination rate
on the Reservation, safer than it is at home.
We will go another way.
We are already on the road,
driving down 97 South.
Mothership carrying us into our otherness.
*
...A CRISIS THAT SHOULDN’T GO TO WASTE
Park Williams, UCLA Climate Scientist
Glen Canyon, Lake Powell, Lake Mead: as drought continues to shrink one of the nation’s largest
reservoirs, a garden emerges. And with the garden, this:
Warmer air evaporates water out of soils and ecosystems more quickly.
So every raindrop or snowflake becomes a bit less potent, because the atmosphere
has this increasing thirst. And that means, as we go into the future, to get into
a drought as bad as the one we’re in now, it’s going to take less and less bad
luck, because human-caused warming is doing more and more of the heavy lifting.
Park Williams
Elizabeth Kolbert, The Lost Canyon Under Lake Powell, The New Yorker, 16 August 2021
*
LOADING THE MOTHERSHIP
Here in the beginning, there is no commerce or profit, no politics or ethnicity or war, no
upper class or lower class, no stories or myths or ideologies, no explanation and no self…
it is a refuge where there are no words. David Hinton, Existence: A Story
Closing the Mothership Log,
I go into the house for coffee,
a cup of Yami yogurt,
Rasspberry Cream,
Moby Dick and Rain Violent
on Mothership table.
Yesterday I finished writing an essay
on Rain Violent, poems and weather signs
by Ann Speirs and Bolinas Frank.
I am carrying their genius with us,
watching, breathing Lorca’s düende,
their supreme struggle with the all,
Shooting stars burn through our air,
but the sea...fire...forests
filling the wind with sea and ash.
My grandson sprawled on the couch
peaks his head up from his Iphone,
Are you still wearing those socks?
Let those toes breathe.
I take the brown paper bag
with fresh peaches from Johnson Orchards,
cold, from the fridge, full of sunshine,
remembering Ann’s quatrains
fitting this morning’s truth:
Out of the scrub, children in red t-shirts
run chasing America like a soccer ball.
Things remain quiet
in the house. I look over
these morning pages,
know how precious this time.
Books sprawl. Not one
hint of Karen’s clean-up,
where she loaded material
for her quilt weave,
her fabric narrative
her threads of golds and reds.
Her color-wheel eyes.
Squeezing time like this,
closing doors behind me,
swinging breaths of gratefulness.
*
CULVER CITY, OREGON--
MOTHERSHIP PARKED BY HAYFIELD AT SUNSET
Another word they used before the word bilagáana
came into use was “Ones who cover up their ears”,
...You see, when I was learning Blessingway from
my father, he told me to just forget about those things…
They do not go with what you are learning...My
father...his name was Water Edge Man. My
father’s father, Man Who Speaks Often,
was a Blessingway singer...I was just a small boy
when I began to remember things.
Navajo Blessingway Singer: Frank Mitchell
Red sun, yellow halo, from Oregon fires.
180 miles from home.
To see our son in the Sierras.
He has a Wilderness Permit for an over-night
Inyo National Forest. Deer Lake.
Sometimes called Crystal Crag Trail.
Begins with steep climb from Lake George.
From this morning’s Art of Peace:
Contemplate the workings of the world.
Morihei Ueshiba. Polish
warrior spirit while serving.
Frank Mitchell leaves school, works for RR
setting ties, turning to cards, gambling.
He’s lost all his money. Clothes in rags.
His new name is School Boy
Don’t overlook the truth before you, ha.
I’ll forget Ueshiba’s book on a stone
by the fire circle when we leave.
Is Karen not the source of all before me?
Rerouting towards the Sierras,
Mammoth and our son, on the mountain
at Mammoth Lakes, still accessible.
Mitchell sings from Story-page.
We’ll be with our son. His Blessingway
through John Muir and Bristle Cone Pines.
David Hinton’s Tao replacing Ueshiba.
No explanation. No self.
Post cards and stamps.
Take pictures of the sun on this hay field.
Karen says, Look at those horses coming our way.
“Here is something you packed.”
“Oh, my two biscottis!”
*
Stopping outside Le Pine at pull off
looking for information. It’s smoky.
Information on volcano caldera.
Oatmeal with brown sugar, Regina Peach.
Unhealthy air. Road open to Susanville,
as four fire trucks pass. Wind blowing
Mothership rocking, Joy Harjo
winding us through the Milky Way
and the poetic justice of the band.
170-mile John Fremont loop takes us
into Pleistocene Epoch, austere, dry,
1.8 million years ago to recent time,
10,000 years yesterday frightening
fundamentalists who shoot up truth’s
story with a .22. Camels, sloths,
giant beavers. Fossilized remains,
and fires. The Albert Rim behind us
to the east. A steep cliff of hardened
lava flows. 30 miles long, 2500 feet high,
a fault scarp made over time, rock-tilting,
mind movement along stretching
fault lines, 300,000 square miles—
all of Nevada, parts of Oregon, Idaho.
Native Americans lived here 11,000 years ago.
Most lived in earth-covered pit houses,
affiliated with Klamath and Modoc people.
I’m cold, sitting here in wind.
390 miles from Yakima, connecting
with Highway 395, Covid-19 morphing,
Delta Variant, a traveler. vaccine-protected,
mask-wearing in public.
But we’re stopped.
Stopped-scared. Fires have closed highway to Reno.
Fires jumping highway. Two cars stopped,
Fast-talking men fleeing fires. Cars getting stuck
in dust and smoke, I lost a headlight—You’re not
going to Reno, are you! We’ve been pulling
people out. A horrible detour. Karen studying map
on hood of truck. We’re low on diesel.
*
Mothership sleeps on the street tonight. We get close enough to Susanville for fuel. Road blocked for detour we did not take.Fire men turn us around at stoplight in middle of four-lane highway. You can get back to Alturas, he says. Where we’re at now on side street outside of Sully’s RV Park, which is closed. Across from the city park. Sleeping on the street.
Pancakes, jam, eggs, syrup, orange juice for dinner. We split a fresh peach. Returning, we drove through Likely, California. Photographed the flags hanging from the General Store. Trump Is Still President, the flags say. Before we leave home, I remember, our friends say, Be careful. Covid’s still mutating.
And the Mothership Logs. Last page, first page. One book ends, one begins at a rest stop. Mothership Log #14 the new one, with Karen’s photograph on cover: See different colors placed over fabric.
Waking at night I have the options of LED light over head or camping headlamp. Frank Mitchell’s Blessingway—to and from Beautyway, Ghostway, Shootingway, Chiricahua Windway, the book opens to a small light from a pickup camper on the street. My father-in-law always gave me a consoling talk whenever I returned after a death had occurred in the family...Take the natural course in this world...Be courageous...I admired that father-in-law of mine for his talks...
This journey begins with a detour. There were roadblocks to Chinle. The appearance of a single poem while traveling. Opening poem, opening word, in a Santa Fe living room, Hozhó, the word, central medicine of the Navajo, through a young Diné poet Lyla Johnston, reciting the words of her grandmother. Power and tenacity of the oral tradition—come to me immediately, and also, over time.
I would like to visit the grave of Frank Mitchell, Navajo Blessingway singer. Would that be possible?
How does one get permission? I would like to visit the grave of Frank Mitchell. Is that possible?
Maybe not.
Every precaution is offered in good will, and with respect.
What isn’t about yes or no, stop or go seems full of good will. Possibly, inside of this reality, if I’m listening correctly, there’s something that permits one to say, maybe one could just wait at the door.
One day Karen says, Why not write a Letter to the Editor to the newspaper in Chinle?
That’s how I contacted The Navajo Times. Write us a letter, the editor says, tell us what you would like to do. Many times this is a way to contact family members who will be able to reach out to you. That’s what happened. One day one granddaughter, a few days later, another. And correspondence from there, along with background information and stories. Fuel? OK. But, inspiration, and a simple invitation. Our family invites you to place flowers on our grandparents’ grave.
*
*
Out of Las Alturas and Neruda, Into the Desert
Las Alturas. Neruda. Don Pablo.
Sube a nacer conmigo, hermano.
Las Alturas de Macchu Picchu
These fires aren’t in the Andes.
*
But now, retracing the miles, a two-hour drive away from smoke we spent the day driving into
—and fires, too, tat home, in Yakima, on Bumping Lake, crossing Highway 410 on Chinook Pass
we have the somewhat meditative glimpse of world-wide itinerancy, millions of refugees with no
place to go, and who nobody seems to want.
Until asked to leave
Sitting camp chair by my bed
Utter estrangement
Jesus, Joseph, and Mary. Trump and guns. Our trees in ashes. Bon fires of conflagration.
Cormac McCarthy and The Road. Father and Son after America’s holocaust. I bought that book
for my son. We sat with coffee in Wallingford that morning saying goodbye. He was leaving for
the Sierra Mountains in California. Father and Son walking. Getting to him again. The trying
to get there. The promise of the hike. Walking. To saunter like Thoreau—that one dream, real as a Forest Service permit.
This is a re-routed Blessingway journey. Restore the earth. Bless the people. Restore and restoration.
A life of recovery. A blessing song. Frank Mitchell’s grave. Cormac’s admonition. Find the good
people.
Sleeping in the Mothership. LED lights. Wobble walk to bathroom when jacks aren’t down
to stable the four steps. Rethinking. High desert. Back in bed. Touching Karen’s arm. Asking
about sleep. I’m good. Slept some. The journey or the drive. The first part. The extended part.
Blessingway for all. Not to get out of anything. To see our son. Slow down. Get through the night.
Check for fires before leaving for anywhere. Checking from Mammoth Lakes, too. From there to here. From here to there.
You have to respect these songs.
That song is what we use during a ceremony to limerr up a person.
They use that song to press the person who is being sung over, to get the circulation going
again and get the person back to normal.
...and you have to be put back to normal in these songs.
It is something to do with Beautyway that is ailing you.
That first sing, the Beautyway had to do with the Snake People.
...well you did something you shouldn’t which I knew was true.
Frank Mitchell gets into water over his head, while on a horse. He finds the water is safer. He
wants to get well to help his children. The land of the people. Blanco Peak on the East, Mt. Taylor to the South, San Francisco Peak on the West, and La Plata Range.
Riding with Joy Harjo and her band: History will always find you/ and wrap you in its arms.
Karen says, I keep waiting for the police to come around the corner.
It’s after 7 am. We’re pulling out.
Desert driving. Is that salt?, Karen asks, as I move the truck slowly to the shoulder of the two-lane highway, I think we better find out. It’s not salt. Let’s have some breakfast. Left-over bacon. Red’s Red Mill Oatmeal, cold watermelon.
Highway 90 to 290 South. Asking Karen, What were your thoughts last night?
No thoughts, but dreams. Cindy and Diane in one. Too much silence in the room. I guess it was a room.
Then, a Christmas party, and Sandy Teagarden came, and I had the dates wrong and the punch bowl was empty. I was trying to figure out what to do.
Empty punch bowl, missed dates, awkward communication.
*
Karen says, Everybody’s going the other way.
She’s driving.
Nobody’s going our way.
A 6% grade.
Trucks using lower gear.
Are we going up or down?
I think we’re going down.
It looks like were going up.
I’m sure there are some ups and downs.
Even in our lives.
Even in our lives.
Here’s where we can tip over, Karen says.
I’m glad there’s nobody behind me.
It’s interesting that there are only cars going north.
Nobody’s going our way.
I listen.
But nobody’s going to Reno on 290.
*
“WE WERE WILD, THEN,” FOR THE TWO OF YOU
for Joy Harjo and T.C. Cannon
Every day a was a praise song,
every word or act had import
into the meaning of why we are here as spirits.
Joy Harjo “Bourbon and Blues”
We wore the same uniform
in the same place and time.
I was at the Evac Hospital,
the 85th, finding beds closer to home
for Gis evac’d out of some LZ.
It was Sgt Pepper Time,
and the blues man/artist/medic
painted my sign into a drum--
the color of the Pride Flag.
Psychedelic Army Orange.
Your name--
T.C. CANNON,
over the entrance to your
gallery at the Heard Museum.
I sat by the paintings of Fritz Scholder.
In a separate room, audience of one,
I watched your story, a movie.
But it’s your self-portrait--
you in fatigues, I carry
this morning into Eastern Sierras
hiking with my son, 50,
mountain man, blues man.
Trailhead at 12,500 feet.
I’m from the Cascade Range
up north. We drove through fires
to get here, carried the music,
joyfully, of our Poet Laureate,
your friend, Joy Harjo. We’ve
got some horses under us,
just beginning. That woman
in Harjo’s poem hanging
from the 13th Floor, reclaimed
herself, climbing up that wall.
Yesterday, Burning Man,
burning woman, my wife and I,
long marriage, drive through
Paiute Country on a Blessingway.
Frank Mitchell the Singer,
and we’re in another museum,
where I meet you again, small
gestures, sage-cedar smudge,
Kooyoue Panunadu Overlooking
Pyramid Lake, off Highway 445,
covering 112,000 acres, home
to Northern Paiute, kuyuidokada,
cui-ui eaters, desert inhabitants here
10,000 years, nurturing threatened
cui-ui fish and Lahontan Cutthroat trout,
Save Pyramid Lake on bumper stickers.
Stick Game Blessing Song from museum
empties into the Kiva and high school below.
Tufa Rocks, also endangered, line a path.
You and Harjo sit at the bar in her poem.
Harjo picks up her sax. Poetic Justice backing.
Like I’m back at the Heard, looking at you.
That car accident. It never happened.
Jim Bodeen
19 August 2021–29 March 2022
*
NOTES WRITTEN ON THE BACK SIDE
OF A DESCRIPTION OF THE MONO PASS HIKE
WHILE BEING GUIDED BY MY SON
Gary Clark, Jr. sings
in the car while he drives
to trail head. Orange Blossoms
onto 395 Highway South,
Mono Pass. We’re going to be
right up this on the other side
of the ridge. Evidence of flash
flooding and slides everywhere.
Nothing like starting your hike
two miles high. We do get to come
back to this, but the light won’t
be the same. At one mile
we’ve gained 846 feet elevation.
He asks me how I’m doing. I say,
It’s too early to say
how wonderful it is,
I don’t ever want to say,
1.3 miles, 1,100 elevation gain
after starting at 12.5. Lose
a liter of water for every 1000 feet
at this elevation. At 2 miles,
switchbacks’s pitch mandates
(teaches?) heel-toe rest
with each step. He says,
That Nile Valley Slide
on Chinook Pass, several years
ago, I see it everywhere. I’m
part dog. The domestic part
is dog. 2,00 elevation gain.
3.6 miles, 2 ½ hours.
1000 calories burned.
All this from his phone.
I ask about Devil’s Postpile,
National Monument, geologic
basalt wonder-columns,
101 feet high—100,000 years ago
when cooling lava cracked
into multi-sided columns—to understand
their sitting, their setting, you must
go back millions of years
to the time when there were
no Sierra Nevadas, when California
was a shallow sea.. Pangaea
was the western edge of North America
several hundred miles east.
As Pangaea rifts and moves
the stage becomes set
for California to arrive.
A turkey sandwich with a slice
of Swiss cheese at Mono Pass.
I’m dizzy after the false summit.
Two young women walking
from the lake to the pass with Captain,
their dog. And another dog, Thistle.
Then us. Father-son. My name is Two Dog.
We share a crumbly oatmeal cookie.
And your mind, Tim,
Coming down from a hike like this?
I try not to fall. Did you see
that tree leaning on that rock?
Jim Bodeen
20 August 2021–29 March 2022
.jpg)
*
BEFORE DEVIL’S POSTPILE
As Karen gets up, I meet her at the bed,
her feet hanging over the edge.
The bed itself sits over the cab
of the Dodge 3500, big dog
diesel carries us in comfort,
but there’s not much room
in the cabin. Reaching out
for each other’s arms,
I help her down, holding her.
Counting days with Karen,
Karen-blessed best Blessingway,
God-blessed blessing come-from deep
song line dreaming, oracular
in her quiet-longing mystery,
thread-line to listening, even now,
first story in half-century wonder,
first person, first source. Whose being?
Belonging to that source, deep accompaniment--
not belonging to, but for, the one-in-all,
my testimony. Again.
After her feet touch floor
it’s a 5-foot one-person hall-
way walk to the bathroom--
Karen’s story documented over time--
the cabin is small.
Being here with her.
Was I ever her first choice?
Here, now, our son, too.
Mid-life at 50, we haven’t seen him
since the plague. I was told in the dream,
Karen is one of the great Mothers.
We have come to bless our son.
Stone Mother Blessing Songs
at Pyramid Lake, handed to us,
come from time. 12,000 years ago
this was all under water.
Sarah Winnemucca spoke.
When animals were people
they had their own way
of telling stories. Traveling
through Paiute Lands we stop
and ask for blessings. Our mother
of all mothers is somewhere
below the mountains. Every evening
build a fire so you know you’re all right.
Her tears made the lake.
Her tears. So cold. Two tribes.
Outside Gerlach, two State Patrol cars.
One aid car. A girl in shorts, bikini top,
stands alongside the road.
You were given the Smudge Prayer for this.
Love coming from many places.
I bring the smoke towards me to surround
my heart so that what has been damaged
can heal and what pain is to come
will help me to be strong and grow
in a good way. Bundle of sage-cedar.
I put my son on skis when he was three.
He has been good to the mountain.
*
DEVIL’S POSTPILE
Arrive before 7
and you don’t ride the shuttle,
Tim says. Beat the people
going to work for the Park.
The three of us
on a forest walk
through basalt columns
fallen, pristine at our feet.
A walking bridge
and a photo of Karen
Where John Muir Trail
merges with PCT.
West Coast, Baby.
Big roots of fallen trees.
Weather-shined by sun and snow.
Tim knows about strawberry shakes
at Red’s Resort down trail
from Post Pile, but when
we get here, he orders peppermint.
Karen and I split the strawberry.
27 bucks for two shakes.
Sitting on a picnic bench
Tim says, See that tree stump?
Go walk around it, Mom.
Tell me how many paces you take.
We see a bear walking down from trees.
Tim gets up to take some photos
while we finish our shakes.
We hear a man say,
When they said
there were bears around
I didn’t believe him.
That’s the first bear I’ve ever seen.
I’m drinking from Karen’s straw
while she tries to take pictures
of two bees drinking from a spill
on the picnic table. Listening
to the firetalk with open notebook.
South Lake Tahoe’s on fire
right next to the fire they just put out.
People want that bear spray, Tim says.
45 to 65 bucks per can. People want it.
There’s a demand. They buy it
against the advice of the store that sells it.
Look at the smoke on the Minarets.
*
Schneider Springs Fire Part IV Blessingway
Tim leaves after dinner. Tri-Tip Steak on the grill. Salad, corn on cob, fresh peach Sundays. Tim puts
stuff on the table. Metaphors taken from technology applied to the personal. He calls it, download, upgrade. Computer terms. We came for this, too. How’s he doing? Blessingway.
Karen takes a nap.
Schneider Spring Fire update. (Our fire in Yakima.) 56,422 acres. Thursday A.M. Growth of 24,000 acres since Wednesday. Now fire has burned to more than three times the size of the City of Yakima.
*
Mariners win last night. 9-8. Ty France 2-run home run in 11th inning.
*
Our family and Blessingway.
I’m still a procrastinator, Tim says. I’m working on it.
Come journey with me, I say to Karen.
I am, she says.
It’s Friday night. Tim has been with us for two days. His off days. Our days with him. Two good days. And we’ll be with him next Thursday and Friday, too. His next days off. Dinner again tomorrow night. We’ll leave and return. The Bristle Cone Pine Forest?
And what about loneliness? I ask.
Loneliness is a drag. That’s what Jimi Hendrix says.
Frank Mitchell, Chapter 8: Blessingway Singer.
“...the Holy People, the invisible beings…”
“You are going to inhabit the earth, while we will disappear from the search into the rocks, into the mountains, into the hills, into the water, wherever we belong...go to these spots and deposit offerings.”
Reading backwards: “...whenever you say a prayer of sing a song, at the end of it you always say a prayer of your own. You say, ‘Well, my Holy Beings, I don’t claim to know everything about what I did. I was just doing as well as I could with what knowledge I have of it.” Frank Mitchell.
Mitchell, learning the Blessingway, talks at length of building or creating the “Mountain Earth Bundle.,” the Blessingway Bundle.” He even renews his Blessingway Bundle, untying it, taking everything out of it, and even asking others for help in renewing. Pollens, especially corn pollen, is extremely important.
Is a family not a bundle?
“If you do these things sincerely…”
The neighbor next to our campsite at McGee Creek is outside talking. They’ve been here for ten days. McGee Creek is just outside of Mammoth Lakes. He walks over to our fire pit. “We came for the Tequila Festival, for three days, and after that the wine festival was here. Oh, and before that, the Beer Tasting Festival. Ten days is a little too long. I’m not in that kind of shape anymore.”
The man, talking to Karen the entire time. “Our friends, ignorant people. They drink too much.”
I’m with the after-dinner blues, reviewing Mothership Log. From the 18th: Karen had been writing, and these are her notes:
K: Do you want a cracker?
J: No, I ate the one I stepped on.
K: I don’t mind doing this. Winnamucca Lakes looks like it’s all dried-up too.
J: Dried-up lakes inside dried-up lakes.
2:30 pm: Sweetheart Summit.
Could one change and drop into wounded disappointment and still be Blessingway. Can Songs for the Curing go through a wounded person while still blessing others?
Don’t take on the role of God. Sit by the table after sunset with your partner. Sit after the sun’s gone, chilled from the outside.
*
21 August 2021
After Sunrise
Sun in smoke beauty
Smoke has returned
Smoke never left
Slept-in, too
Slept in smoke
Camp chair with notebook, with coffee
After 7 now
Comfortable. Cool. No chill.
And this, from Bonny in China:
“The story of the stones can’t be told.”
One of the stellar ones: Student-become-colleague. Musician-cellist-writer-poet-teacher:
“Sometimes, go a little farther. Still can’t believe we walked up this little canyon beyond the Temple in Mangmuse after we explored Zhagana National Park, but so glad we did. It’s one advantage of being so far West [in China] in the same time zone since you have daylight for way longer in the east. Starting another hike at 5 pm? No problem.
I don’t know yet. Could be a poem. Or an epic novel that I don’t know how to write.”
Her photographs of the cairns.
Her second decade in China. Go a little bit farther. The story of the stones can’t be told.
*
Existence rustles. It wonders. It wants to recognize itself, wants orientation. It must for it evolved animals like us that feel compelled to do such things. Recognition, orientation: how could it begin? A cairn perhaps. Stones gathered, the largest few settled on flat earth, and the rest built-up from there: slowly, one stone at a time, keeping things whole. A cairn is mute and elemental as empty awareness. Ir orients. It recognizes, and means in a sense, everything around it, for where does it end? Its extent includes all of that elsewhere. It recognizes, but says nothing.” Existence: A Story. David Hinton
...for it is about everything other than itself.
So this morning. Strip away everything that can be doubted.
Empty awareness...the beginning place,
free of thought & identity
...where we are most fundamentally ourselves.
And another friend—Michael Davis, this morning: the Buddhist:
Beauty before, beauty behind, beauty above, beauty all around, walking the beauty way.
And my response to M. Davis:...but beautiful. What Joy Harjo says, We were here before jazz was born.
*
“Where you found that stone,” Karen says, “in McGee Creek, crossing that foot bridge, like it was waiting for you to find it, when that stone was finding you, I found my way to the bakery.”
*
Karen is telling me about Rosie Lee Tompkins. She has found a new article on her by Margalit Fox, written after he death on December 6, 2006, when she was found dead in her home in Richmond, California. She was 70.
Rosie Lee Tompkins, born Effie Mae Howard. She had been talking with Eli Leon yesterday—the Thursday before she died. This fiercely private person. Eli Leon had discovered her at a flee market when she was making pillow cases. Karen gives me this quote from Leon in the article: “Something she told me once was that despite the fact that nobody knew who she was, she felt like she had no privacy. She felt like she lived in a glass house and people were watching her.`
Several years ago while collecting suiseki stones [Suiseki is the Japanese art of miniature landscape stones] in Oregon, traveling in the Mothership, Karen had discovered Rosie Lee Tompkins in an article by New York Times Art Critic Roberta Smith. Karen is a quilter, and a fabric artist. Her individually designed and hand-sewn vests dressed me in my working days. She dressed me up, leaving me free of neckties and sport coats. I pay attention when Karen talks about quilting arts. On the day Karen discovered her in the Mothership, I didn’t. Today a mixed-media painting by the colorist Rex DeLoney
hangs across from Karen’s place in our living room. Rosie Lee Tompkins is part of our family. She’s a listener. Her mother, too, also a quilter, is in the painting.
Of her quilts, Rosie Lee Tompkins said, God designed the quilts and held her hand. Rex put her words in the painting, God let me see all the different colors. I hope they spread a lot of love. A fragment of the painting is on the cover of Mothership Log !4, the one I’m writing in this morning. Rosie Lee Tompkins is one of 15 children from a small town outside Little Rock, Arkansas, where Rex paints and teaches. Born Effie Mae Howard, she took the pseudonym, Rosie Lee Tompkins from her shyness. Effie Mae Howard was one of 15 children. She picked cotton. Roberta Smith from the New York Times writes, She has an unerring and intuitive sense of color.
Karen sees quilts everywhere. She is a primary source in the Mothership, and at home the artist-Mother.. Karen, too, a beauty blessingway. A singer of color and thread. A muse, yes, so quiet she terrifies.
*
AT MCGEE CREEK TRAILHEAD
Wood camp fires not allowed.
Subalpine plants and trees rely
on nutrients from decomposition
of dead and downed wood.
Campfire closures begin process
of returning areas to natural condition.
Sierra Bighorn Habitat, endangered.
Look for them above 10,000 feet.
Black bears tell us, this is
their habitat, too. Once
we’ve gotten into your food
we’re not wild anymore.
Hiker on the trail, Mexican-American,
from Jalisco, Ramiro. Ram Geronimo.
We talk about Lago Chapala,
Wonderland Trail on Rainier--
Mt. Tahoma. He’s been on my
Mountain, I’ve been on his. Ten
years younger. Both of us
Army vets. We’re laborers,
he says, I’m one year retired.
Another man from L.A.
One needs guides to get here--
inside becoming itself,
a charger but no cord.
Look around. Real windy
last night, a young hiker
tells me—so be sure
and throw down a guy line.
Water source at streams.
I pick up three stones
at two stream crossings,
a group of riders come
down from above, while
my fingers turn stones
in water. Where you been?
I ask the leader. Picking him
up at Grass Lake. He gives
me the sharp smile,
You must be living right,
TCB, Look for the yelling
that might be your bullet--
Dad. Then the last man from L.A.
coming from Steelhead Lake,
German accent, asks me
where I’m going. I’m going
to where I finished the poem--
back there a bit. Putting
a small stone on a boulder,
look around, find two others
calling to me. Make my cairn,
turn around, and start back
to camp. You could walk
to Canada on this trail--
John Muir Wilderness--
you’re on it walking to PCT,
Pacific Crest. You could.
I’m three miles in
at Beaver Pond, three miles
and a drive back to camp. To be
the contradiction, Tim,
is the Beauty-Blessingway,
Blessingway going slow, stopping
before going, not going,
a stone crystal on a day hike,
blessed procrastinator owned time.
Jim Bodeen
21-22 August 2022
Tim’s got a map to help us locate those petroglyph. We drive into Shidago Canyon, a most wild and beautiful ride. At one point, so narrow I pull in the the mirror on the driver’s side of truck so we’d have enough room to pass through canyon walls. We do lose our tailpipe.
We don’t find the petroglyphs.
Karen and I will look today.
Leaving for Bristle Cone Pine Forest.
No water. No hookups.
I open David Hinton’s Existence. Looking at a group of small granite pebbles, I have an idea for a cairn-temple altar to build this evening. Hinton...forgetting...in forgetting...in another book, somewhere, Hinton writes, ...we do more forgetting than anything else. “...this immediate experience of empty awareness was the beginning place, that dwelling place here in the beginning, free of thought and identity, is where we are most fundamentally ourselves…
Sun on my right shoulder and back.
Creek music in my ear.
The water heater clicks on in the Mothership.
“This Cosmos is the Cosmos of our immediate experience, and if we don’t think of heaven and earth as mere abstractions, we can see that heaven and earth are indeed an accurate description of the physical reality in which we live.”
The Mothership itself is an act of resistance.
*
DUCK PASS, PICA LAKE HIKE WITH MY SON
8. 6 Miles round trip
10,700’ elevation
1800’ elevation gain
He’s been here. Tim has.
Hell, he’s been here on skis, skinned up.
Karen’s in parking lot at Twin Lakes.
We’re the unexpecteds, arrived early,
and we are—I am—adjusting,
the altitude. Tim catches me
with his camera, (showing me later)
he can see the difference between
Mono Pass and Duck Lake--
Did you decide to go
on your own adventure? He calls out
from behind me. I’ve lost the trail,
lost in thought by where he’s taken us
in two days. I’m listening to creek music
from the creek, following it
instead of crossing over stones.
Not the trail? Ah,
listening to moving water.
Duck Pass. Inyo. Do drone Zone.
GPS says trail took us into a knot,
Tim showing me on his screen.
Woodpecker sounds like he’s
knocking on a dead tree. Almost
to Arrowhead Lake. So many lakes!
Passing it on way to Skelton,
going to skirt Arrowhead. Take
Arrowhead trail away from Emerald
(But Tim will take this trail
on way down—) if this were
winter we could glissade
in the absence of switchbacks,
but beautiful, dried-up pone,
moist and sensuous,
light-filled sun-fried open.
My son in his wild path
has also sacrificed his life
for his father’s road,
a paradox,
I state here as his gift to me.
One I’ve recognized and thanked him for
over the years--
I’ve been to Arrowhead
on foot, he says to me, handing me
broken pieces of obsidian—yes,
handed, created and shaped--
Arrowheads—The first time,
he says, I was at Barney on skis,
skinned up. We sit with Ritz crackers
on an island crossed-over rock
below Duck Pass drinking water.
That Neuttragena you put on your lips
causes cancer, he says, not smiling.
So many creek names to keep straight
their mountain water ways
or their names: Cold Water, Skelton.
Father-Son doing journey-road backwards.
This stream the opposite of the Art of Peace.
How so? What was I trying to say?
One more hard part. Barney’s another.
The breath, the breath.
Take this photo for me.
Stream splashing over rocks,
blessingway, veins
in stone-blood
circulating
the body of the earth.
*
BRISTLE CONE PINE CAMP, GRANDVIEW
Ranger Station, Schulman Grove.
Karen shows me a photo. “It must have been a purple pine cone at one time. I didn’t know about purple pine cones at the time. I just noticed that it was a dark color, and sap was coming out of it.” We learned about purple pine cones on the Discovery Hike through 4000 year-old trees. The oldest trees in the world. At the Ranger Station—too late to buy books, Rangers leaving as we arrive, a man and a woman, the man tells me of a book by Ran Laner. The Bristle Cone Pine, that will orient you. Two hikes. Karen and I take the Discovery Loop. Over a mile. Trekking poles. Karen makes it, switchbacks and all, rocks, elevation, 10,000 feet. That hike, with Karen, late afternoon, dusk, gnarly trees. How could a day be better?
Back in the mothership, Karen says, I’m going to turn out the lights in here and see if I can see the stars.
WE’RE IN A JUNIPER FOREST
AND THE TREES ARE ALL OF NATURE
AND FULL OF BERRIES,
I’VE CHEWED THEM
Pulling into Camp Six last night
I liked the position
where our heads would be in bed
raised two inches for good digestion
but I didn’t see the side angle
(but Karen did)
((and Karen maybe too tired to protest))
and it meant (and means) crooked
walking those 5 steps
from entrance through kitchen
up to the bed. The bed,
too, was crooked, sideways
and I didn’t mind that
(Karen said, I don’t know
if I can lie like this).
Karen was tired, though,
from switchbacks and spending
all that courage from her hike,
while I reaped the benefits
of how close she was to me,
close on the trail, close in bed.
Several times during the night
I warmed myself with her body
rubbing her back muscles
which must have been sore,
her trekking poles made
that descent over stones,
possible, but she’s not
used to that kind of physical
stress. But beautiful
that hike, beautiful thing
going with Karen.
*
My references to beauty, to the word beauty, include William Carlos Williams in Patterson,
Beautiful thing,Geoff Dyer, in he book on jazz, But beautiful, from his essay on Art Pepper; Frank Mitchell’s, Blessingway Singer; St. Paul in the New Testament, blessings; Mike Davis’ Buddhis Beauty, Above, below, around, almost like John Donne’s, ...license my roving hands, above, below, behind, between, around; the word ‘blessing’ in Spanish, bendicion, a compound word, Say good things, Beautiful thing…
*
Make another cup of Yuban instant
done with Starbuck's' expensive Via
and pour it into my new
lime green mug, while
water heats up I cut
cold cantaloupe
we picked up in Bishop,
slice it into bite-sized pieces
for breakfast
with Bob’s Red Mill oatmeal
and time is ‘nothing,
David Hinton says,
‘other than the movement
of change itself,’
*
“In that perennial moment thoughts and memories appear and wander and slip away…”
Then: the physical,
see mist
ridgelines
writhe, swell, thin away.
Through it all, the alcohol and drugs, the tv commercials and the bullshit of American capitalism,--
everyone in that Imperial family murdered, but one--
Shih Tao –
Stone Waves, the painter in disguise
The wanderer
Stone Waves declares himself
in the person of
Ink Stone-Wander
he hikes to a mysterious place
vast and deep.--
Everything,
Everywhere
Somehow alive
Nothing holds still
DRAGON--
DRAGON EVERYWHERE
“Just enough form to feel it…”
“The
mountains in Stone-Wave’s paintings have the seeing feel of this
dragon…
The mountains!
“In and out of view
among rock and water
cloud and mist.”
David Hinton, pages, 13-15.
Note to self: Maybe take Lao Tzu on Methuselah Hike today.
Karen’s up. Show’s me
her drawing of Juniper trees
with berries. I step out
of the mothership
cut her sprigs
bringing in
a forest of berries.
“I haven’t had enough courage
to do that,” she says.
“It’s good for that tree.”
She shows me another drawing,
“Doesn’t that look like
a cabin in the woods?
That’s the outhouse.”
*
From here, back to Tim, Change in route, change in direction, how love confronts illusions and more drives through fire. jb. Morning of 3 May 2022, Sea Side, Oregon.
*
THE METHUSELA HIKE: BACK AT THE
TABLE WITH COFFEE AND JACKET--
TRANSCRIBING THE POEM
WRITTEN ON AN ENVELOPE
A special look, spiky dead tops--
bare wood, limbs, trunk
distorted, polished limbs
with exposed roots. Lateral
movement and erosion.
Youngsters don’t live as long
as the ancients, their softer wood,
insects and invasions.
Steep slops, exposed dry soil,
alkaling, magestic and weathered.
Trail guides, xeroxed sheets
for a buck in the box.
The essential poem,
Look for all things purple
in a feminine world.
This baby on the trail,
old as I am, steep
brown hillside, this
morning light,
on twisted trunk stops
me on trail, sunshine
on trees, breeze and shade,
cool, brisk. Carrying
video camera in hand now,
can’t help myself!
Alkaline dolomite soil,
grow without competition
time to brink out the Tao--
How you compose yourself
in front of a tree? This tree!
Before you go any further,
a reminder, these are
the oldest trees in the world,
you don’t have to outgrow
your attraction
to the polished trunk, Don’t dismiss
any shades of color/texture--
Keep letting their story talk,
Water and bench at Number 5
Lao Tzu, My notes at bottom
of Hinton’s Preface years ago,
One’s own mortality a kind
of forever. Here, ernestness
of way, ancestor after ancestor
beyond wave after wave
of man, these mountains
put La Tzu in pack, or keep
him out, it does not matter,
your first half-mile, the poem
is being, is written for you,
exist, but you’re not here,
remember what the Rangers
said, Oldest ancestors
aren’t the prettiest. Of course
Jesus walks this trail, young,
don’t be stupid, numbers
repeat themselves in a way
that helps you to see.
Roots collect water
like a pipeline—Look
at trail guide if you question
your belief in trees
as ancestors, photosynthesis
and wonder. These aren’t gateways--
at the bench, sit and take
some water, a couple
bites from your peanut
butter jam sandwich.
You’ll want to call it Monkey Mind,
Trailwalker, and where is this
besides astonishment.
Thank you again, Mary Oliver,
#8, Vance this pic at Sign 8
is for you, your photo
framed Sand Ridge for-
ever in every place, your
color on my indelible wall,
and John Muir, he never
got to see these wonders,
and Thoreau, all the poets
singing for us, their lateral
roots, deep too,
in their reaching.
Camp #6
Jim Bodeen
Bristle Cone Pine Campground
Sunset
*
ANOTHER TAKE ON BRISTLECONE PINE CAMP:
*
THIS TWISTED LIGHT: WALKING THE METHUSELAH TRAIL
IN THE BRISTLE CONE PINE FOREST
This document is for my son, Tim Bodeen,
ski tuner, boot fitter, who points my way
in the eastern sierras. He is a guide. Further,
names appearing here, or in the document itself,
began arriving during a walking of the trail.
As they began to show themselves I heard/saw
them first as nostalgia spirits, then as muses
participating in the walk as they brought
clarity and inspiration. This, too, inaccurate.
They are prophets all.
Vance, Barry, Marty, Kevin, Karen, Krista, Leah,
Chuck, Bill Ransom, Don King, wes hanson,
Navajo Blessingway Singer frank mitchell, cindy yurth, lloyd draper,
grandchildren, grandma and grandpa, david hinton,
vonnie, craig, tyler, brian, lee bassett, terry, jane, michael,
blue begonia women poets, rob & jackie, ron marshall,
jim & erica, Pastor ron moen, harald & ethel
--That we may laugh and fight and sing
And of our transience here make offering
Edwin Arlington Robinson
--Sunlight, rain, snow, air. Indeed, as we now know,
earth is made of heaven’s scattering of stardust.
Existence, A Story, David Hinton
This twisted light, this walking with the ancients.
Older than Methuselah. This man against the sky.
Out of order. This drive into silence.
Edwin Arlington Robinson and Lao Tzu.
Inyo National Forest, Out of Bishop,
168 East, Twelve miles to the turnoff,
then another dozen miles to Grand View Park,
where we are now. I say to Karen,
Thanks for this, writing these fragments,
If you think your horn is going to be heard…
or you can see around corners at 10,000 feet elevation.
Schulman Grove. Schulman, who takes core samples
of these oldest living trees, dead of a heart attack
at 49. Robinson, great modern American poet,
surprising me with this appearance
taking first steps. Steady tone-poet walking
into a new century. Walk turning time.
Remember what the Ranger said,
The oldest trees aren’t the prettiest.
This twisted light. Shaped by weather,
man-like storm being. My people named
by gratitude’s necessity. Karen studies cones in camp.
Developing cones, deep purple, absorbing
sun-heat. Two years maturing to brown,
getting their names from these cones, scales
tipped, claw-like, bristling. Needles an inch
long, in packets of five tufts. Trees store
the history of the weather. A climate changing.
Stop writing anytime you think you can.
Walking at dusk with the oldest trees in the world.
Caught off guard walking with the camera.
The prayer-talk, the after-walk. White Mountains
dolomite-laden. Stopping here: companions
in trees and people, this sun-gold trunk, these elder silver backs,
This blessingway of grace, Hozho beauty.
Trust the camera to find, walker, you with only
eyes. Beauty way, blessingway. But beautiful, Art Pepper.
Don’t pretend your eyes can see. You’re blessed
and the Ranger is wrong. Elder-time beauty,
elders in their strange indifference.
There is no way to select beauty, one from another.
Be careful, boots. OK, this is the Gateway,
Post 14—here’ through 18—the ancients,
1957, Edmund Schulman, searching climate records
in tree rings, discovers one’s age at 4,600 years.
I should take off my boots. I’m standing on sacred ground.
John Muir never saw these trees. And Thoreau.
Gary Snyder never left a footprint.
I’ve not encountered another soul on this hike
other than Karen and spirit companions. This tree, died
back, and alive, through an alternate route.
Tree planters at Empty Bowl. Mary Oliver
giving us the word: astonishment, counter-acting
Monkey-Mind. My son walking me into the Sierras,
me not knowing where I am, Son of the Mountain,
you’re a Tufa stone from Mono Lake
with Mark Twain, Strange stones,
beauty above, beauty below, beauty all around
burning sage, cedar smoke smudge gateway
into Sierras, left turn into Bristle Cones,
petroglyphs, where is he going, Mr. Robertson?
David Hinton, grandchildren, mom and Dad,
any who I’ve walked trails with, Grandma and Grandpa,
why it all comes out on this trail, in these coiled
roots, twisting, resisting, sun photographer.
Not leaving out Christians. Jesus in this poem
from the beginning, the Hebrew Bible, the Tao,
Look at the nearby tree with partially exposed branches
a half-way point turn, mom and dad, Karen,
Discovery Trail herself. Reading my own
history in these trees, walking and weeping.
Love you so much, daughters of mine, those
who’ve touched our lives among the wild trees,
lonely one, Father Stanley Marrow,
Bultmann and the demytholoogization of Christ.
Tree before Christ, this partially exposed trunk,
with just some bark remaining.
Oder trees beginning to run out of nutrients
dieback allows them—these...harsh conditions, oh my,
look, those brown cones on this steep hillside.
And did you get what you wanted from this life, Ray Carver.
These ecotones, this edge of habitat,
wave after wave mist and smoke, smoke,
the fires, too, ever closer, This brought camera
in case there was anybody found
that one might want to listen to. Bristle Cone Pines,
White Mountain Stardust Monks. Root walkers.
Walkers in the zone of individual difference,
this, too, is the story of a house of trees
in stony soil. Flammonde doesn’t know
where he came from, and he’s in a house on fire.
As far as this, and more, cresting the hill
with questions that won’t say no,
As if he were the last god going home.
These images stuck early, blessed and blessing,
walking with friends into wild practice
who would, and will, show themselves against
horizon after horizon in tear-stained beauty,
sometimes with Robinson’s question,
Where is he going, This man against the sky?
Jim Bodeen
Bristle Cone Pine Forest—Yakima,
22 August 2021–23 October 2022
*
Just before 8 pm
Karen hands me my mouth guard
(I asked for it)
I put it in my mouth.
Karen has done most of the housework in the cabin. I’m grateful for this. She read #29 from LaoTzu. Hmmm, she said finishing. What did you respond to? The last lines:
And so the stage steers clear of extremes
clear of extravagance,
clear of exhaltation.
When I told her what I responded to she says, Well, that doesn’t work anyway. We’ve tried too many times to make a difference. Karen-sage. Me-fool. Oh, extravagant one. OK, but Karen is the sage. Granted. But I also respond to this line, one that we didn’t talk about.
“All beneath heaven is a sacred vessel.”
So many things – nearly everything is already forgotten in the notebook, already left out of the poem.
Our daughter Krista was tested for Covid-19 today. She has been exposed. She feels like she has the flu. Remembering Blessingway. Let me remember, and practice.
Karen and I. We have driven to the big trees. The wild ones. And now, we’ve walked among the old ones.
READING JOY HARJO’S POEMS IN THE EASTERN SIERRAS
AFTER WALKING AMONG BRISTLECONE PINES FOR TWO DAYS
Do you know how to make a peaceful road?
Joy Harjo
This is the third time on this road.
First time to make it. I place
a period between two words.
Exile. Memory.
And after walking among sacred trees,
read: And then what,
you with your words
in the enemy’s language.
For days I’ve been breathing ash
from burned trees set by my use
of fossil fuels in the vehicle
that made it possible
to walk among you.
I have twisted the meaning
of Joy Harjo’s poem
and lost a book on peace-making
where I stopped by buy fuel.
Walking through the oldest
living trees in the world.
I said aloud the names of every ancestor
I could remember and name
who put a book in my hand or gave me
direction by showing me how to love.
So many gateways opened in trees.
I called for the camera to help me see.
Three times the camera turned me
in circles, exposing me to beauty.
Before, behind, above and below.
I would not have known.
I am sleeping in a space ship
with rubber wheels never before
put on the road, their grip
and traction already
tested ad approved for highway roads.
I step outside in a juniper forest
and look at stars in Star River:
the Big Dipper, childhood familiar
North Star, including my searching connection
to all those close, and smoke.
*
Our last act this morning before leaving Grandview Bristle Cone Pine Camp, was to stand outside
the Mothership, Karen and I, and read Joy Harjo’s poem, Bless This Land. It’s a call and response poem, and this is how we read it—priest/poet/chorus, and we traded roles at Karen’s suggestion in the middle. It looks like this, then. “Bless this land from the top of its head to the bottom of its feet.” The blessing line, no punctuation. From the arctic old white head to the brown feet of tropical rain. This second line, the response line, in italics.
And one more example:
“Bless the two legs and two feet of this land, for the sacred always walks beside the profane in this land.”
Italics: These words walk the backbone of this land, massaging the tissue around the cord of life, which is the tree of life, upon which this land stands.
OUTSIDE OF TOPAZ, CALIFORNIA
Finishing Mothership Log #14, Karen hands me her notes. Notes she made for me. Notes she
hates making. “I’m not, I don’t take dictation,” she says. “But that’s all I do,” I say, “write down what I’m given, it’s a noble vocation,” I say.
KAREN’S NOTES: 10:20 OUTSIDE OF TOPAZ:
Tamarack Fire. I thought that it was the fire that stopped us. “Blowing dust. Use caution.”
We are escaping the Calder Fire, and now, the Dixie Fire is next.
Leaving Lemon Valley gas station. (Check charge for gas. $75.00 dollars).
“Your road 395 may be affected by Antelope Fire.
“At the start of the 20th Century, Owens Lake in Southern California was one of the largest inland bodies of water in the United States. By the mid-1920s it was gone, drained to provide water to a mushrooming Los Angeles.” Nov 12, 2018, Internet.
Lake Lazarus. The strange rebirth of a California ecosystem.
When and why did Owens Lake erupt?
Owens Lake, Ca. Dust billows of the dried bed of Owens Lake in Inyo County, California in March, 2010. The lake dried after water diversion from City of Los Angeles, and became largest source of PM10 pollution in the U.S. Online 29 Oct. 2017.
*
Passing fire trucks now. “Fire equipment ahead.” Use Caution. Trip mileage 1,892 leaving Hallelujah Junction. After stopping for lunch.
Passing fire trucks, a military convoy.
Passing three more fire trucks now, all headed South as we head North. 7 more trucks.
That little white church the fire went around. Surrounded by burned trees.
Dixie fire right up to both sides of road, right at the shoulders. Driving through last week’s fire.
Honey Lake. “Ill write it down and you can look it up.” Hat Creek for Hanlen. Cataloging creek names. Tim fixes the clock. Stopped in Klamath for DQ. On to Big Pines in Crescent, Oregon.
Rain Violent, and an email from Phoebe Bosche, publisher of Raven Chronicles, my review on Ann Spiers’ and Bolinas Frank’s book, Rain Violent has just been published online. Rain Violent, one of the books we’re carrying in the Mothership. We’re in the eastern Sierras when Phoebe’s email comes in.
No concepts here, no writing about weather. We’re in it. We were in it when we left home. Rain Violent, we’re part of what we’re traveling with, we’re part of the smoke.
The cover with the weather symbols. Cover on this book. White paint over black. Brush marks. Hand-drawn font. Human-steady. Fingerprint with its own DNA, Bolinas Frank, the calligrapher. On the kitchen table in the cabin with coffee stains over the white cover, over the white circles. Coffee stains from my spills. My prints. Where this happened, more than once. Most likely, I don’t know. The book before me. The poems inside me. Ann Spiers’ poems. Bolinas Frank’s symbols. I finished my review, submitted it, with Ann’s proofreading, days before we depart. The poems, back again. Again and again.
Rain Violent right. Violent. Get that here driving through smoke, fires out there in the haze, in the smoke. You can’t see the fire, but it’s already turned you around. Rain violent during a drought. This one’s not going to get you wet. These titles: Rain Slight, Rain Continuous, Rain Slight, Rain Heavy, Drizzle Thick, Drizzle Continuous, Drizzle Thick Freezing. One after another like that. An onslaught of violence. Drought and more drought. Drought and wind. Seasonal drought, yearly drought. A decade of drought. Arriving like that, rain continuous. Weather you don’t understand and don’t know.
Don’t know except you do. Drizzle Thick. Drizzle Thick Freezing. Language of all before your North Dakota eyes. Your North Dakota ears heard it, heard and overheard. Weather talk. Men and women both. Where’s the rain? This drought can’t last. But this is different. This weather here, Shakespearean.
No exaggeration here, farm boy. This one’s a big storm, homie. Those missiles undergrounds, resting in all that seeping water, all that money rusting.
These are Ann Spiers’ poems. Listen again: Mirage, Visibility Reduced by Smoke, Dust Devil, Dust Raised by Wind, Dust Storm Severe. Let’s look at these poems. Look at them here, before the clouds and sky. Before these: Clouds Forming, Sky Unchanged, Clouds Dissolving. Let’s look at the first ones. Mirage and visibility and dust. Those first. What you’re driving through. Like the Schneider Springs Fire. Wasn’t that the one in Yakima? Your town? Didn’t you drive through your own smoke leaving town?
D. H. Lawrence and American Literature among the poets after his classic study. All those writers blowing smoke. And Whitman.
Desert rain, violent rain, American poets and sand dollars from an ocean get-away. Ann Spiers lives on the other side of the mountains from us. The wet side, coastal side of the state. We’re separated by mountains but not dualities. Rain violent unites us, wet and dry. I take another look at her poems hunkering inside the poems beneath stark titles and bad weather. This poet, and suggesting her representation of other poets—she’s having a pretty good time. “We infect you,” she writes. Doesn’t she love that! We are contagion before the plague. We. Swarming us. We won’t be tracked as we ride,
and ride they will, these poets.
Rain continuous goes beyond Seattle’s weather. We’re the rain, she seems to say. Rain gear is our uniform. She knows Wallingford riding with the bicycles. “Some of us go naked, ...through the market.
Everyone wears shower caps..” Tourists visiting Seattle ride through Wallingford—with its public art amid its peculiar and proud behavior, in joy, reckless and proud—from inside tour buses. These poems are familiar with the mountains, they take their children on trails.
Bear spray might not be the same joke here as they are in the Sierras, but they’re familiar with bears, and tell bear stories, name the bears adjacent to the strip mall. Once you feed them, these poems know, the bears are no longer wild. Beauty everywhere, apples wrapped in gauze, worldly poems have empathy with migrant workers and Joshua Trees. One can bet that children of this poet, these poets, climb those grand rocks at Joshua Tree knowing what ropes are for.
Credibility is gained from venturing out, going off-trail. Melting snow to drink, the poem descends:
Yes, our breath formed small clouds; yes,
glaciers opened for us, crevasses moaning.
Ah, the poets. Singing Woody Guthrie loud, echoing L. Cohen again. Did they take one of the cities? And how? One knows, reading these poems, these poets know their Cohen: “We are ugly but we have the music.” But beautiful.
How poets talk in the wilderness, together, with each other. That’s how these poems sound, familiar, intimate. Campfire talk.
*
*
Passing fire trucks now. “Fire equipment ahead.” Use Caution. Trip mileage 1,892 leaving Halleluiah Junction. After stopping for lunch.
Passing fire trucks, a military convoy.
Passing three more fire trucks now, all headed South as we head North. 7 more trucks.
That little white church the fire went around. Surrounded by burned trees.
Dixie fire right up to both sides of road, right at the shoulders. Driving through last week’s fire.
Honey Lake. “Ill write it down and you can look it up.” Hat Creek for Hanlen. Cataloging creek names. Tim fixes the clock. Stopped in Klamath for DQ. On to Big Pines in Crescent, Oregon.
Mothership Log 24 August 2021-- There are entries before and after what is included here, that need to be revisited. Jb 31 March 2022
Here’s one:
EVERY TIME WE STOP THE MOTHERSHIP
WE HAVE TO WIPE THE TABLE OF DUST
LOTS OF ROAD PILING UP IN OUR SHEETS
So the children will know where
their grandparents are buried.
Driving into Chinle we follow
a local red pickup, whose riders show us
how to slow for caution. Crystal
clear guidance allowing
no dark opening.
Being and beauty’s highway.
Beauty in margins, margins
sharing road’s shoulders
with all those wild flowers.
Called by Navajo Blessingway Singer,
Frank Mitchell.
Setting up the morning at midnight,
notebook cruising, unguarded words wheeling.
The past week in wind,
seeming different, new and old,
like Karen’s breathing,
her breath as she sleeps,
her gift to me at night, waking.
How shall we know our grandparents?
Mothership a zendo dream machine.
Karen’s breath over time, a lifetime,
heavenly beautiful, belonging.
Old wagon out front.
Grandpa hauled freight like Frank Mitchell.
These childhood red wheels.
Beauty above, beauty below, circling.
Jim Bodeen
Chinle, Arizona
9 September 2021
*
*
PICKING JUNIPER BERRIES FOR KAREN
AT ANTELOPE PEAK OVERLOOK
--for Cindy Yurth and Lloyd Draper and Karen Bodeen
I. ...the Holy People, the invisible beings…
Frank Mitchell, Navajo Blessingway Singer
After thinking I’d lost this notebook
and after the morning we’ve had
in the notebook while at breakfast
with Cindy and Lloyd, Cindy,
reporter for Navajo Times, Lloyd,
Navajo veteran, Canyon-
orchardist grandfather, eating
blue corn pancakes, talking Mothership
Joy Harjo, before taking roses
to grave site of Rose and Frank Mitchell,
Old Chinle Cemetery, Karen saying,
I’m looking for a cross, There it is. Returning
to the Mothership, retracing her steps,
Karen leaves me to walk the perimeter,
writing down names, dates, proverbs
carved in granite. Children’s toys can
be picked up easiest, dust-walking
among trucks, tiny swings, so un-
like teddy bears fur-ground crushed
and rolled over by visiting cars, here,
at the Navajo Cemetery, the old site,
powder-dry soil, pick-up rolled known-
impression ed by painters and printers.
A kind of embossing, or watermark
soil-ground or on fine papers
made of cotton for rare books.
II. I smudge my ears so that I will listen carefully to others,
learn from what they say, and become someone
they want to talk to.
Paiute Smudge Prayer, Pyramid Lake
I walk the perimeters of this cemetery,
why I came, without apology,
asking forgiveness. Blossom
beauty present Blessingway. Already
lunchtime, it took me three
years to get here, through Cañon de Chelly
Monument before that, too, where
Karen buys children’s books for our daughters’
kindergarten students, finding Raven,
Navajo hogans. I find Tall Woman,
Life story of Rose Mitchell, Frank’s wife,
Sovereignty of Food, listened into existence
with fierce devotion by Charlotte Frisbie,
recorder-anthropologist emeritus, mission-
restorer, a-mission-in-her-being. And now,
her books among us. Enshrined and humbling.
Her attention through scholarship, love-
practice, and to us, email. It’s lunch time.
(Charlotte Frisbie also restored
Our Lady of Fatima.) Cindy has called
orchardist Lloyd Draper to have lunch
with us. Lloyd, 61, needing a kidney dialysis
Lloyd’s grandfather planted
the 100-year orchard after
scorched earth campaign. My grandfather
came back and planted trees. That’s why
they’re 100 years old. I was trying to see
what it must have been like for him. He
likes to read, wanted to be a writer--
not one of those who lays on the bed
and has white people write it for him,
a vet, his father a vet, (the two of us,
sharing a year in Viet Nam). I’ll
send you books, Lloyd. We order
from the Navajo Menu. I have
Lamb sandwich, Karen, a side
of Fry Bread. When I call the chile
on Cindy’s, California, she says,
Don’t say that around here.
She’s studying Diné,
has a piece in the anthology,
Wet, how she and her husband bought
a piece of land with too much water
in a dry time drought.
It’s after one pm and hot at the Mission,
smoke from ribs on grill reaches us first,
then a voice calls out, Ya-ta-he.
We’re looking for the priest with the keys.
III. ...concerning the fast-paced hard soft beat employed in the hand game
is that its cadence is against the heart’s rhythm. This counter-palpitation
creates psychological excitement, confusing the guesser and adding
to the emotion..Judy Trejo, Liner notes from CD Stick Game Songs of the Paiute.
It’s Father P.J. from the Philippines.
50, he wanted to go on a mission.
All the work inside the chapel is Frisbie’s.
I photograph the Four Sacred Mountains,
and three of the Stations of the Cross--
and corn, standing alone on this wall.
Lovely in subdued light. At lunch
I ask what a chapter house is. How
Navajo govern themselves. 110
chapter houses in Navajo Nation.
Meet once a month. Everyone votes.
Real democracy. Cindy’s attended
all 110 Chapters. Somewhere in here,
Karen driving, I’ve misplaced this
notebook. I don’t implode. Father P.J.
opens the church and mission, searching
for it. We return to the restaurant,
ask at counter, half dozen waitresses
comb the restaurant. In and out
of the cabin, in and out
of what’s in and out. I no longer
distinguish. This notebook covers
one week of timelessness. Seven
days of images, videos, being itself.
Do we—do I dare trust where
I’ve been—to see, hear, feel?
I say yes to all that’s uncertain,
to all we’ll never know. Who
can be more vulnerable? Crowded homes
increase during this plague. Reading
Frank Mitchell’s Blessingway
in the restaurant, first to myself,
Well, my Holy Beings, I don’t claim
to know everything...Am I blasphemous?
talking of Hozho. One is thinking about it,
one is thinking about it, faith is to be
the main beam...It is a sacred house
that I have come to, now I have come to
the house of the Earth...the beauty,
and I am not passive reading Blessingway.
IV. ...Sunlight, rain snow, air. Indeed, as we now know, earth is made
of heaven’s scattering of stardust, and will again become heaven when
our sun explodes into a nebula that engulfs, earth, turning it into stardust.
David Hinton, Existence, A Story
We drive to Antelope Point
where I find the notebook
while in altered reality. I walk
the cairns to Lookout.
Karen buys jewelry from Elaine
from the back of a pickup.
The notebook has new value.
Get it home, get your story.
Get it home, I write in the notebook.
Cndy wants a poem for her interview.
A poem to accompany the Blessingway
Singer’s song. Mr. Frank Mitchell. So
that I might better understand, Hozhó,
heart of Navajo religion. I spend
the afternoon cobbling lines
from notebooks, internalized images
of Blessingway. How can one say
but worn-new, exhausted of previous
under-standing, by the people
of the gift exchange, the give-away
of it all. Give away of all, and all
beneath Heaven is love.
Jim Bodeen
Chinle, Arizona—Yakima, Washington—Seaside, Oregon
9 September 2021–5 May 2022
*
Blessingway Notebook from September 10, 2021
10 September 2021
Friday
Day 26
Chinle, AZ
WAITING FOR MIDNIGHT
to begin this day.
It’s not today, yes?
Not yet. No.
It’s close, but no,
not yet
Not midnight
*
It is now,
now it is,
It is today now
It is, but
it’s still early,
early and dark
it’s not yet
time to get up
it’s notebook
*
But what to do
That’s just the thing
Don’t know
what to do
or how to be
I might get up
if just to pee
*
To practice properly
AOP
Art of Peace
Calm, cleanse, say thanks
to all, returning
to source
not malice
no selfish desires
*
0430 hours
10 September 2021
Chinle, AZ
Mothership
Turn out the light
or open the book
turn out the light
close the eyes
rest in what happens next
*
0630 Hours
Up with coffee
all of yesterday
coming forth
Scoured walls
Notebook looking everywhere
Giving thanks, being grateful
Smudge prayer enters my head
coming in like smoke
looking at a pile of books on the table
Tall Woman
Navajo Blessingway Singer
Navajo Blessingway Singer Revised
with new essays by Frisbee
Two Mothership Logs besides this one
a ton of books in the mothership
and a ton of money spent
bringing them forth
Karen with earings of painted
kernels of corn
Have I gotten down on my knees?
Have I gotten down on my knees in this life?
If I have been sufficiently humble
balanced in my search
I will have been grateful
in a healthy way
If I have scoured the rock walls
for evidence of your beauty way
ancient ones
I learned this practice
from my mother
Lucille Viola Everson Bodeen
She taught me.
She gave what’s been brought forth here.
One who scours rock walls for the beautyway.
From the beginning of time
to the oldest tees in the world
Beauty-Blessingway
to the community cemetery
in Chinle, Arizona
and the gravesite of Tall Woman
and Blessingway Singer
walking with Karen,
my mother who insisted
on washing kitchen floors
on her knees
I have been a keeper of floors
a vacuum er of rugs
I have looked into the corners of things
I’m talking about my soul
I have been at the Lord’s work.
It doesn’t matter what you call it.
Jesus doesn’t mind.
Ya’’ ahh Teh.
Hello in there
Hello
Hello, John Prine, Hello, Bette Midler
Take a break, now
Go make that second cup of coffee
Good morning, Karen Benson Bodeen
*
I open:
Tall Woman: The Life Story of Rose Mitchell, A Navajo Woman, c. 1874-1977.
Charlotte Frisbie, editor, and, I’ll say, [adding to what’s not in the Notebook, Listener and companion to Rose Mitchell. jb. 1 December 2022.]
“...born in 1874, six years after the Navajos returned from incarceration at Fort Sumner (1863-68), and who lived for ‘102 plus’ years, reaching the People’s goal of death from old age in 1977.”
“...it is being published to fulfill a promise made to her in 1963.”
Rose & Frank, 12 children, 7 of whom survived them.
Charlotte Frisbie’s
Frisbie’s intro to Tall Woman
*
“Maybe I’m thinking about it.”
Rose Mitchell
to Charlotte Frisbie—her 4th request.
“Doogie” made tapes.
Tall Woman’s children in 1995 wanted the book done--
“...just like you did Dad’s.”
“Why would you put our voices and your in with hers?” “It’s her story keeping everyone else out.”
Man Who Shouts—Tall Woman’s father.
*
Mexican Water. Code Talker. Highway 191 N.
*
Mexican Water. Code Talker. Highway 191 N.
*
Leaving Navajo Country
this morning, a cultural ending
of the journey. A good drive.
Drove about 250 miles
after Moab, it’s river running
ATVs, where we are now,
KOA in Green River
Watermelon days
We bought one
Black Diamond Seedless
Green River KOA 3:30 pm
Karen’s up on the bed legs over pillow
Her legs swelling. I give her 2 IBU profins
Air conditioning on in the cabin.
I’ve got a cup of Italian Roast Starbucks
Instant, camp chair, legs up on picnic table
We just came from
John Wesley Powell Museum
across the street. Closed it.
We had one hour.
Powell's voyages
from Green to Colorado River.
Two on the Colorado. I didn’t know
about the museum curating—of Powell--
More time as a professor
than anything. Took his wife
with him into battles in Civil War,
on boats in rivers. I’m guessing
he needed her.
At Green River, now,
98 degrees. In liminal space.
63 degrees in Yakima, raining.
I don’t know about smoke.
Parts of me wants to be reading
about Tall Woman, Rose Mitchell.
Was it just yesterday morning
We we putting roses on her grave
in Chinle?
Dinner in the mothership
from Chinle Catholic yesterday.
Ribs, beans, banana pudding.
Karen didn’t eat banana pudding
and then Green River Watermelon
Did I say that? Just repeat myself.
*
Karen and I sit outside with ice cream
Lawn chairs. Lee of Mothership
Sun on the other side.
*
“When I first met Tall Woman she was 89 and, as she said, ‘in early old age.’”
Charlotte J. Frisbie’s Tall Woman, Intro: xxii
*
Back to the Life Story of Rose Mitchell, A Navajo Woman.
Jish : “Participant observations mean you’ ‘fit in,’ help out, do...”I learned to herd, shear, and butcher
sheep…” and modre xxv
Her role as the ‘ person who kept everything together, Tall woman tells Franks she’s learning things about him she never knew.
*
●
LINES WRITTEN IN ADMIRATION
FOR A MAN ON HIS MOUNTAIN
--for Tim Bodeen
Ten days on skis by December One.
Deep mountain skills combine
with mature practice making
Eastern Sierra powder cloud beauty
possible. Creating his own
mountain vision wonder,
what I said to your mother last night.
Bai Hao Oolong leaves broken
from a brick after morning walk
on icy streets through housing
construction zone, remembering
your call from the gondola last night
as it takes you from the mountain
down into the village and home.
It’s 20 degrees in Yakima
and fingers still cold on tea cup.
Listening to Gary Snyder talk
about the wild in Colorado
ten years ago through hearing aids.
Snyder examining roots of the wild,
threading carefully from wild nights
to orderly process, how survival
can function on its own, natural.
His talk 123 minutes, length
of this walk, 3 ½ miles, the same
number of minutes. How to make
a life, what you’re doing, rare air
and altitude adjustment. These lines
fix themselves to inside tracks,
trails walked by you and Snyder,
Tim Bodeen, Gary Snyder, John Muir.
You put your mother on the John Muir Trail,
and took your father to Mono Pass.
World Cup on tv. Camaroon versus Brazil,
fire on. This Sierra book in the mail,
another look at you on your mountain.
Love, Dad
2 December 2022
Jim Bodeen
9 January 2023
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