THE OLDEST TREE
One hundred winters
revealed in shaped pine
potted beside bench
Jim Bodeen
26 June 2013
BONSAI ARTIST
Pot these trees
working with your tiny tweezers
Jim Bodeen
25 June 2013
Bonsai Artist
THE OLDEST TREE
One hundred winters
revealed in shaped pine
potted beside bench
Jim Bodeen
26 June 2013
BONSAI ARTIST
Pot these trees
working with your tiny tweezers
Jim Bodeen
25 June 2013
Wiring the Shimpaku Juniper
CONVERSATION WITH THE BONSAI INSTRUCTOR
I’m a beginner
At this point we're all beginners
Beginners beginning
Before bonsai beginner
Jim Bodeen
17 June 2013
CONVERSATION OVER THE SHIMPAKU JUNIPER
When did you wire this?
Two weeks ago.
Take it all off.
Jim Bodeen
17 June 2013
FOSTER PARENTING THE 15-YEAR OLD JUNIPER BONSAI
Gold glow tips called by light
stretching sunwards
as in hands of praise.
From humble beginnings, for and from
its creator, honoring another ancient way,
the gift exchange after a lesson, we repot
the Golden Juniper together,
four hands holding all that’s radical
in exposed roots. My teacher
trying to remember himself.
My son was a baby. Now he’s 15.
You’ll have to show me some things,
I say, thinking food and water,
not yet wondering about tools or foolish mistakes,
the intricacies of wiring tiny branches,
not knowing what confusions
the tree knows, having been there, listening, every day
with the father for fifteen years.
Jim Bodeen
June, 2013
WIRING THE SHIMPAKU JUNIPER
Wiring before the master’s eyes
Cause for much of the terror
Spotting turns on branches
telling me to start over.
He’s not out here now
in the garden while summer rain falls
running from wire to plant to fingers
and things couldn’t be any better.
Jim Bodeen
29 May 2013
No One Can Say What Your Work Shall Be
MORNING PRAYER
God of Impracticality, God of Nothing But Truth,
may I be useless in all things, save your service.
May I take care of my dogs.
May they be my only teachers.
May they help me in my nothingness.
May the word be adequate, nothing more.
The poem manifests its way in my hands open before you
in my commitment to our correspondence.
Provide for me a path of such uselessness
that I am left swirling in daily confusion
conforming only to that which is misunderstood
and to which I commit daily
with no sign of affirmation
from you or the world.
Make me the most useless
among any in the world who have eyes.
Jim Bodeen
January 6, 2006
THE NOT-YET ADEPT, AWAY FROM THE MASTER
DURING QUESTION AND ANSWER TIME
DURING THE SHANE CLAIBORNE WORKSHOPIN THE LUTHERAN CHURCH BASEMENT IN YAKIMA
EMBRACING WHAT’S UNCOMFORTABLE
THE YOUNG MAN STANDS DURING THE WORKSHOP
What you’re saying Shane Claiborne... is...
…you’re like the fireman… instead of running away…
from...like a sane person...
…you run towards...
...you paint me out to be more courageous than I am, Shane says.
We get courage in community we can’t muster up on our own...
…there’s positive pressure too…
…surround yourself with a group of people whose response to injustice runs to injustice…
…always in a context of community—Iraq, Afghanistan…there...
...when I was in Afghanistan with Mairead Maguire…
...with approved people who would inspired in us our…our…
...Do you ever get scared, Mairead? they asked......Oh, of course I get scared—
...but being scared is different than fear...
...fear is when we let being scared stop us from
...what love
requires of us...
...when we allow our fears, prejudices,...
...stop us from what love requires of us......were really inspiring me toward courage I couldn’t muster when alone...
...the mustering…
…I think all of us, we’re all of us going to be
uncomfortable
with what’s unfamiliar...diversity, diversity......towards what love requires...
Jim Bodeen
18-22 May 2013
THE BLUE WHEELBARROW
Stuns me, shocked as I am
by its load of music,
but it’s not, it’s not
Jim Bodeen
15 May 2013
THE DREAM WORLD SHOWS ITSELF IN MATTER-OF-FACT
NARRATION IN ITS UNERRING DISCOVERY OF GOD,
WHILE ATTACHING ITSELF TO WHATEVER HAPPENS TO BE THERE
All day watching trees in wind, working hard
not to work hard, a workout for deep roots.
May tomorrow bring them rest and a big drink of water.
There is a store in this town called Bed, Bath and Beyond.
No shit. They’re advertising a wood turntable.
The hope is that it will serve to prune and shape
the little trees. Turns out it won’t work.
A well-oiled machine, it’s true,
but what would it hold besides a salt shaker?
Sorry, the young woman says, from the check stand.
She tells me there are more of these stores
all over the country. Bed Bath and Beyond.
They’re linked, she says. Like a chain, I say.
Where, I ask, is the Beyond?
I thought you were looking for the exit, she says.
No, I say, I’m looking for the Beyond.
OK, she says, we’ll go with that. Turn left.
Street lights swing wild on wires competing with trees
for my attention as I leave the mall. Red and green lights
going in opposite directions at the same time.
They look like they could
fly off their wires.
I could go on like this,
it’s all before me today.Thirty minutes in the swimming pool
might just save my life. I pull into the parking lot.
Getting out of the car, a single sheet of paper
blows out of the back seat. I know it’s a poem
and I’m tempted to let it tumble free.
I’d also like to know which poem it is.
Fuck it, I say to myself, I’ll go after it,
chasing it across a soccer field. It’s the second page
of Dick Hugo’s St. Clement’s: Harris,
from Harold Bloom’s American Religious Poems.
Hugo’s been gone 30 years? It seems like yesterday
the rich lady’s club tried to fly him into town
under cover without giving him a chance
with town people. He was delighted
to read for kids at the high school
descending into the KIVA at the city school.
The cathedral is locked and all Dick’s rehearsals
leave him at the door. Close again. Catching the poem
with my foot, picking it up, I read
Christ came on so northern he wore skins.
Did I know I’d find something this good, stepping on it?
Dick banging on Church doors across centuries,
shouting, Let me in! Let me in!
Fish and faith. Hugo would fish all waters
looking for the word calling him home.
He’s lost in sounds repeating plosive d’s and b’s
peeking into forbidden light.
Jails and leaded windows fail us again.
The door, remember, remains,
and what thou lovest well, locked down.
All of us are prehistoric and come from barbarous times.
Don’t we have amazing numbers when looking at ours?
Is it any wonder we have more poets than swimming pools.
Given the first reading from Acts on the 5th Sunday of Easter,
I remember what the baseball coach tells the batter
walking to the plate, Find a way to slow the game down
until you find a pitch you can make contact with.
Peter assumes this tone while talking about his trance.
No need to grasp at straws, he’s given every creature
to ever enter a nightmare:
voices, visions, spirits, and an angel to boot.
Acts 11: 1-18. Look it up.
Everything happens three times and Peter can’t turn it off.
Stay with me, children. As I said in the beginning,
it’s straight-sounding, matter-of-fact narrative,
all God, saying one thing, this:
God gave them the same gift he gave us.
There is no us and them. Go slow with your bat
to the plate, and slowing the dream to mortal speed,
you know the truth. No us. No them.
Caught off guard, Yeats cheats by one year,
cinching down at 40. I’m too late. You’re too old.
So says Jhezzus Joyce, as Pound called him.
Meanwhile, the little trees, sit by the white fence
out of the wind. The camp chair sits empty.
Here it’s a smaller world, things to take care of daily.
I’m drawn to something I can’t take care of in this lifetime,
attracted to trees liking, and needing, acid in surrounding soil.
Jim Bodeen
28-29 April 2013
THE BEGINNER, NOT YET ADEPT,
DOES HIS RESEARCH AWAY FROM THE MASTER
PREPARING HIS BONSAI SOIL
Akadama and Kanuma
used for centuries in Japan
Rarest pumice
Precise moisture, nutrient and air
Sharp edges promote short roots,
retain water, directs air,
moist, not wet
Akadama, Turface, Seramis
Turface found in cat litter
Tesco brand—low dust!Ask auto mechanics, too!
Napa Superabsorbant absorbs oil
Hi Dri 40-pound bag at Carquest Autoparts
Jim Bodeen
April, 2013
Meditation on Violence: Karen's Chief Joseph Vest
Dheezus wasn’t quite over her virus
spending the day with Grandma,
as Karen sat with her vision before the sewing machine
with only button holes to cut and sew
before her celestial vest
would be ready for children in Heaven.
Grandma, can you make a dress for Tygee?
she says from the carpet
where she sits with her stuffed tyger.
Grandma’s response is already in Heaven
as she begins to cut material for a dress
that will never quite satisfy Dheezus.
I’m in the room to watch for button holes
while Dheezus has already moved on to plans
for Tygee’s hoody and halter top.
By now Dheezus has moved on to Grandma’s lap
and cutting ribbons. Karen cuts holes
in the new scarf for Tygee’s ears. She’s discovered, too,
how to turn the light on and off
for the quilter’s finer stitches.
It doesn’t quite fit, Grandma.
It doesn’t look like a dress. Tygee’s
going to need a coat. As I said,
This is Tygee’s lucky day.
She’s getting an outfit. Between the time
of the dress and scarf, Dheezus dresses
Tygee, fitting and refitting the new clothes.
Karen works with stitching two small quilts
with poems of Blake and Yeats ironed
on to muslin and stitched to the back
of the Pendleton wool. The tiny quilts
will fit into two pockets of the vest.
The Blake poem from the Songs of Innocence
fits into the front pocket, folded over
so that the poem remains unseen,
while the Chief Joseph pattern adds
texture and pattern to the elegant promise
of peace through refusing to engage forever
in genocide. As Dheezus dresses Tygee
on the floor she watches a movie
on the small computer screen promising
another vision of nonviolence.
But as I said, this is not the best day
for Dheezus—she’s five, recovering from an illness
that’s knocked out her energy—she has Grandma
alone in her sewing room and she wants
a new suit of clothes for Tygee.
Dheezus is tough and she likes her way.
Because I need to feel Karen’s energy
in her Chief Joseph vision for children
I’m standing behind her, invisible to the keen
advocating eyes of Dheezus dressing Tygee.
The inside pocket contains the quilted poem of Yeats
taken from the song of Mike Scott of the Waterboys.
They shall be alive for ever.
They shall be speaking for ever.
This quilt will be placed inside the pocket
where Karen has sewn these words,
For the children of Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Our twin daughters both teach kindergarten,
and four of our six grandchildren are between the ages
of 5 and 7. The ages of the 20 children whose names
Karen has sewn onto the inside of the Chief Joseph Memorial Vest.
Karen asks Dheezus to help put Tygee’s arms
into the sleeve of the coat. The sleeves are tight
and this frustrates Dheezus as she tugs.
I’ll tell you, though, Tygee is looking quite good.
Spectacular now in her new outfit.
Dress, halter top, scarf with cut-outs for the ears,
and this blue coat fitting her for any child’s bedroom,
any store-front window, any child cry wail for dream justice.
The lining of the vest is a rich sheen
and as Karen turns it inside out and hangs it on the wall,
she tells me, it’s really reversible, too.
That might be too much, I say to myself
as I read the names to myself, catching my breath
saying, Dylan, Jack, Benjamin.
Allison, Caroline, Charlotte.
This vest of 20 names.
Dheezus, home-sick from preschool,
remains oblivious to all going on before her.
Karen’s cut buttonholes retain a precise beauty
and her hand-sewn stitching guarantee
a tight hold on the beautiful silver buttons.
Dheezus’ recovery from this virus is going to be slow
and that’s the way she wants it. Her attention,
laser-like, fixed on Grandma and Tygee,
and what she might get grandma to make next.
Days like this don’t just come along every day,
and Tygee? Well, Tygee, now. Tygee is looking good.
And this vest—this vest makes us all look good.
It’s the kind of thing we wear walking with angels.
Karen’s hands take our breath away looking at what she’s done.
We’re silent before her quiet work.
Before all this beauty we don’t know what to do. How to act.
We’re closest to the world of Dheezus and Tygee.
We’re waiting for instructions.
After the silence, listening.
Jim Bodeen
4 April—16 April 2013
MELTING GUNS INTO A BAPTISMAL FONT
with immigrant families
when we got a call about
a family illness. Waiting
for a phone connection
the news came across the wire
of the latest school massacre.
Both of our daughters
teach kindergarten.
Let’s melt some guns
and make a baptismal font,
my pastor friend says.
I went looking.
Young cowboy in a pawn shop
shows me a High Point 45.
Big bullets. Tears you up, he says.
He’s been shot three times.
Kids have these, he says,
They think they’re Glocks.
There are no Glocks in town now.
After Christmas sale. All sold out.
The young cowboy listens.
Yes, I carry, he says, I’m carrying now.
He slips his hand in his jeans pocket,
showing me the small pistol.I've got 13. All expensive.
Jewelry for the last day.
I put money down on the 45.
My wife got madder’n
hell.
We’ve never had a gun in our house.In the end, I didn’t pick it up.
Lost the money to the pawn shop.
The .45 is most likely back on the street.
I wrote the pastor a check, though.
We’re going to get a baptismal font
if we have to make it out of clay.
We’ll get it to those families.
My wife is a quilter and a fabric artist.
She makes art to wear.
She’s making vests for children
to wear in heaven.
Names of the children are sewn into the lining.
Pockets for poems like this one.
Small things to stop the bleeding.
Jim Bodeen
9 March 2013
WHAT HAPPENS IN THIS LIFE
JODY ALIESAN: please
post, MY TRIBUTE
22 April
1943—14 January 2012
From psalm: 18: You take care of yourself now, I yell back, You too.
From the poet: Ribcage whistles for the wind to play.
—Jody Aliesan
She had that poem, please post,
and I loved to post it.
I took her side. Some of what I carry.
The Tao, always, preceding thought.
Alden Nowlan writes from Canada:
I used to broadcast
at night alone in a radio station/
but I was never any good at it.
But Jody, in please post:
Choose rather to be wrong than false.
And further up in her poem:
So how about you
What everyone knows but no one speaks
The Kiriwini of New Guinea call ‘mokita’
Short memories preserve good consciences
St. Joan. Jesus. Jean Burden. Leonard Cohen.
Her ja signing off on emails. Raven and the Raven Chronicles.
Rocks and stars. Gold dust and the Vishnu Schist.
Leave Me Be and Burn the Bridges. Her songs.
The poem and the poet. The abyss.
The listing of frauds. Her list. An education.
The psychopath.
Epigraphs and footnotes, reporting.
Bicameral men did not imagine. They experienced.
So says Julian Jaynes as we read in one great synchronicity.
The king dead is a living god.
Auditory hallucinations instead of pheromones.
To hear was to obey. The bicameral mind.
So many things. As Jean Burden says in our conversation,
Behind every poem must be felt the abyss.
Depth below depth. What keeps the reader
From falling, is a thin, taut, protecting wire.
Without the wire and the abyss
There is no poetry that matters.
Jody. True North/Nord Vrai. Speaking from notes.
Jim Bodeen
13 October 2012
FREDDY COUPLES' DAD
During my teenage years in Lake City
in north Seattle, I would go golfing with Mike Bliss and Gary Couch at Sand
Point Golf Club. Mike and Gary had golf clubs and I used my hockey stick that
we brought out from North Dakota. What made me mad was that neither of the boys
would let me try their clubs. This one man used to watch us playing and
arguing. He was golfing with his son. One day he came up to me and asked me a
few questions. I almost freaked out. I thought he was laughing at my jeans that
came from the old Spiegel catalog that looked like they were made for shoveling
coal. Like the ones my Grandpa Charlie wore. But that wasn’t it. I mean, he was
interested in the boy golfing with the hockey stick. One day he asked me if we
had a golf course up there in North Dakota near the Canadian border. Sure , I
said, but it was different. I told him how the circle where they put the hole
was made of gravel, and that it wasn’t green. And I told him that the golf
course was also the landing strip for airplanes. He thought that was pretty
cool. One time he asked me if he could show me how to swing with that hockey
stick. I thought it was pretty cool. My friends never understood why he made
such a big deal out of me. Somewhere during that time I learned that the boy
was Freddy Couples, who would go on to become the greatest golfer from Seattle.
For me, it was always about Freddy Couples’ dad, who showed me pointers on how
to golf with that hockey stick. I always remember how he did that.
Jim
Bodeen / April 2012--April 2013
Old dog and allergies. All the allergies. Food and pollen. Black lab. Sister Sadie Sadie. Eats salmon every day. We have options, our vet says. Hers and mine. Cortisone. Vet’s on her side. Cortisone Shampoos. Plural. Cortisone. Take away that itch. I think of the writers. All my friends. Our allergies. My old dog. They’re expensive, she says, but they work. I know something about cortisone. Seventy five bucks for the two of them, the vet says. Can’t get these at Walmart. Boy does it lather. Sister Sadie Sadie on the front lawn lathered all up with cortisone. She’s not scratching now. On her back. Good dog. Good, good dog. Sadie in a trance on the lawn. From her belly out. Vulva, anus, legs to the paws. Between paws. Lathering with that cortisone. Leave it on. Work it in. Ten minutes. Then rinse. Shake it out, Sadie. Repeat. Boy does it lather this time. Puts her back in that sleep. Then the second one. Leave-It-On Cortisone. All the tender spots. Red spots, from scratching. Lathered and soothed. Layered and lathered in Cortisone. My friend calls. The poet. He has allergies. Some of them from this world. Like me. Like my allergies. Old dogs. Mid 60s. I‘ve still got the cortisone out, I say. Two cortisone shampoos. My wife looks up at me, listening, now. Yes, I say, my wife, too. September sun. Front lawn, on your backs. All that cortisone. No more allergies for any of us. Good old dogs all. Shampooed and lathered on the lawn. Cortisoned.
SPIRAL-BOUND AND COMMONPLACE: LETTER TO PHILIP BOOTH
AFTER THREE DAYS WITH LIFELINES & TRYING TO SAY IT
“For us poets, in relating to what we’re about (and perhaps what the all is about), the scale of our saying relates to the measure of the line we intuitively hear as we write.” Philip Booth
“…toward a theologically marginal grace…” Philip Booth
“…until I can feel how my first line sounds, I have no idea how the rest of the poem may breathe or hold its breath…” Philip Booth
Against all pressures
to be present,
including your own,
grandfather surging,
back out of the now.
A country boy
who lived in town,
displaced
from all place
but the poem
Your pressure
on language
sprung spilling
Afraid of all that sea
in your poems
I stayed away
from wood
cut & stacked
in that boat house
on water
you built it
Saying the thing
Your great room
clear before me
breaking ambiguous
lines
going both ways
approaching you
in the desert
·
Some letters to poets no one could write.
The thought of it all the way through,
beginning to end, the writer so far away from the writer.
At the far age of the age you wrote from, I write you.
These are the white birds on the foam of the sea,
and Yeats sits with us,
your neck of the country, with parents.
The children—well, grandfather—this is what
grandfathers are for—holding the unspeakable.
An Irish group, Waterboys, singing Yeats,
singing children to Heaven,
White birds on the foam of the sea.
Your nothing, your each other, over and over.
Lifted words
from random Lifelines
fallen as they fell
not as you made them
as you made them
harbor quick luck
Ax splashing sinks
remembers shape
reshaping eddy flooding star,
Thoreau, nothing
Letter to Lowell
Daily wed word
man light mindful
flower steeped-sun
Orchard deer-women
Pocket heart walking
eyebrows report bobbled
native nickel hillside
Half-teacher in blow-sdown
before each day’s courage.
Nothing to match this
Nothing, nothing
Displacement and nothing
Not the letter
I sat down to write
Not the poemI thought I’d intended
The poem having its own way
Like you showed us
Jim Bodeen
10 April 2013
LINES ON MY MOTHER’S BIRTHDAY
and even as I was given
to the dreaming world
it came with the knowledge
that she wouldn’t be pleased.
It’s her birthday
and she’s waiting
for my response.
Christ, for many,
does not rise
in their lifetimes.
Whatever happens
in this life with no guarantees,
it is my work
to stand with these
who suffer
without being lifted up.
Jim Bodeen
9 April 2013
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