WALKING INTO MUSICAL INSTRUMENT MUSEUM
OVERHEARD CONVERSATION ON LONG MARRIAGE
Helen, your bracelet just fell off your arm.
What?
Your bracelet just fell off your arm, Helen.
Jim Bodeen
2 Dec 2017
Advantage to the Residual Heart
LINES OF 5, LINES OF 7
Creosote leaf chew
Oil-coat savoring water
Text desert tongue test
Sinagua at crossroad
Karen comparing time lines
millennium chart
Seed pods of mesquite
Forest flour ground into meal
Baked into cakes
Mesquite sap candy
Adhesive and medicine
Common cold tree part
Writing all morning
Talk with Karen day and night
Ear and eye event
Her long loneliness
When I can't access wonder
It's a public death
*
These are the women who played with courage.
These are the women. These are the ones
who explore the virtues. Deciding
is the virtue of the will
temples of spirit radiating
from bodies, merging
with the fabric of sky.
These are the men who played with blocks
These are the men. These are the ones
who explore the virtues. Love
is the virtue of the heart who live
in house wonder, wondering in hallways
of house history. These are the ones,
women and men of the imagination.
These are notebook lines
*
IN THE TIME OF DYLAN
How to read houses from paper models.
Hands on wet clay shape a new thing.
Building it. Desert shelters.
Living in the time of the cantalever.
Sheer force, moments developed
in beams. Wind and earthquake stresses.
Midpoint balance. Frames for lateral loads.
*
Go fetch me a 5-man.
5-man what?
5-man rock.
Five guys?
You and four others.
Cherokee red names the color of my life.
A friend from home sends a poem
about the dark time we're in
and it's that dark.
Where I was last night
walking on lit path
Cosanti, the thing first
Ready, fire, first word
orient house proper
5 weeks to 5 years
Pull built environs
Implode together
Each one hand thrown pot
Craftsmen on five-count
Urban sprawl offense
Only cars connect
All in the notebook
Disparate image
Breath-way desperate
House before the thing
A bell in the yard wants wind
Light-rubbed patina
Jim Bodeen
28 Nov--2 Dec 2017
WALKING LONG LOVE IN MOONLIGHT
20 ANGELS LIGHTING CANDLES
WHILE KAREN AND I WALK
LONG LOVE THROUGH TIME
Full Moon Luminaria
Yo Yo Ma strings sent our way
Churros dripping brown sugar
Jim Bodeen
2 December 2017
Storypath/Cuentocamino: : Re-Calling Dorothy Day
Storypath/Cuentocamino: : Re-Calling Dorothy Day: READINGS FOR THE 29TH OF NOVEMBER COMMON PRAYER POCKET EDITION A LITURGY FOR ORDINARY RADICALS SHANE CLAIBORNE & JONATHAN-WILSON ...
Storypath/Cuentocamino: : Re-Calling Dorothy Day
Storypath/Cuentocamino: : Re-Calling Dorothy Day: READINGS FOR THE 29TH OF NOVEMBER COMMON PRAYER POCKET EDITION A LITURGY FOR ORDINARY RADICALS SHANE CLAIBORNE & JONATHAN-WILSON ...
Re-Calling Dorothy Day
READINGS FOR THE 29TH OF NOVEMBER
COMMON PRAYER POCKET EDITION
A LITURGY FOR ORDINARY RADICALS
SHANE CLAIBORNE & JONATHAN-WILSON HARTGROVE
--for
Pastors Jim Engel, Obispo Medardo Gómez y Abelina Gómez, Ron Moen, Shane
Claiborne, Paul Benz, Jill Ross, Mike Scheid, Eduardo Cabrera, Ladd Bjorneby,
Emilio Benitez, Esau Cuevas, Mary Bosell, Eric Anderson, Alex Schmidt, Abiut Fajardo, Carol
Nelson, Carroll Hinderlie(s), pastors all, Lars Claussen, Paul Palumbo, Eliseo
Pérez-Álvarez, Chris Wogaman, Harvey Blomberg, Caroline Hellerich, Ron Marshall, Kerry Kesey,
Phil Nesvig, Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Dean Stewart, Martin Wells, Susan Briehl, Rabbi
Abraham Heschel, and especially for
Pastor Harald Sigmar;
--for Fr.
Stanley Marrow, S.J., Pastor Rudolf Bultmann, Fr. Thomas Merton, Fr. John
O'Riordan, Fr. Dean Brackley, S.J., Brother David Steindl-Rast, Fr. Ignacio
Ellacuria, Fr. Rutilio Grande, Fr. Jon Sobrino; for the Mary Knoll Sisters of
Chile and El Salvador; Sister Elizabeth, Sister Mary Ellen Robinson, SNJM,
Kathleen Ross, Sisters of the Holy Name, SNJM, and Sister Roberta Rorke,
Sisters of Providence, Mary Rita Rohde, SNJM, Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus
and Mary, and those classmates from SUMORE at Seattle University.
--for those
poets with begging bowls and without collars, and in other traditions, monks
all; all catholic workers, inside and out.
I. PRAYERS FROM THE POCKET EDITION
"We dream of a holy village in the midst of the urban
desert"
"Advent is the season when Jesus put on flesh and moved
into the neighborhood."
"Becoming the answer to our prayers: A few ideas"
"3. Dismantle a bomb. Or dismantle a theological
argument that dismantles bombs."
"With his coming, we learn that the most dangerous
place for Christians to be is in comfort and safety...Places that are
physically safe can be spiritually deadly."
To find each day's
scripture readings for the morning office, consult the following table. For
information regarding the person or event commemorated on a special day,
consult the 'Annotated List of Special Days.' pp. 105-151.
II. MY TAKE ON THE READINGS
11-29 Dorothy Day.
Psalm 139: 10-16. Micah 7: 1-10. Mk 13: 24-31
Micah first, post-harvest, gleaning.
Woe, woe, woe. To men and MSNBC.
My desire for first fresh fruit.
In your lover's arms, don't open your mouth.
50 years ago, when I was 23, newly married,
I found William Stringfellow's book
in Jerroll's bookstore in Ellensburg,
My people is the enemy.
Salmo 139: 10-16.
Lo contrario!
Aun allí, tu mano me guiaria
ni las tinieblas serían oscuras para ti,
y aun la noche sería clara como el día.
Sabe todo de mi, Señor.
Aprendí esto como
joven
en el estado de Dakota
Norte
en mi pueblo. Supiste
todo
de mi, incluyendo que
yo
identicaba con los
indígenas.
Begin by reading the wrong verse
in Mark. Go back to it this morning,
perhaps rushing now. Do I have
to do my lesson over? Fig branches
in spring. Sap running. Time--time
is urgent. It is when you're hungry.
If you're out in the cold
chances your neighbor knows this,
are high. You got it.
You're the neighbor.
What you gonna do, bro?
III. DOROTHY DAY AND THE ANGELS AT THE SPA
8 Nov
1897--29 Nov 1980
Entertaining Angels, title of the Paulist film,
doesn't Paul show up in the unexpected places?
An image from a friend in a moment of doubt,
You never know when you're entertaining
an angel. When you're working at this level
like Miss Day, you're blind to elevated talk.
It must come as epiphany, lifting and sustaining.
My take: she didn't see herself this way.
This film can be rented at Amazon
immediately for two dollars, 97 cents,
and for seven days, it's mine. Karen
says she's going to the fabric shop
to look for material. Epigraph on black
screen opens the movie: I wanted the abundant
life. I didn't have the slightest idea how to find it.
Moira Kelly plays Dorothy Day. 1996 movie.
Film opens with young black woman
screaming in chains--jail cell or mental hospital--
can't tell, Day with her, Camel cigarettes
and a Zippo lighter--I can still hear the click
from mine--set in NYC, 1963, year
I graduate from high school. Martin Sheen
plays Peter Maurin, who (I find out later,
Googling, wrote Easy Essays in verse,
If we are crazy, then it is because we refuse
to be crazy in the same way that the world is crazy.)
Eugene O'Neill, all the artists, right there.
Alcohol and cigarettes. Artists looking for more.
Day writing, wanting that. The unprinted stories,
looking the other way. Love at the beach,
and a daughter, Tamar--there's a good
Old Testament name. Tamar won't go away,
and she won't get off Scot-free. Children
off the obsessed may learn a better way
but they'll pay a price. Day write.
(After watching the movie, wondering about Tamar,
I discover her youngest child, Kate Hennessey,
has this year--2017--published her book,
The World Will Be Saved by Beauty.)
Day's granddaughter Kate says,
All of us are inside
Catholic Workers,
outside the Church. Inside/Outside.
I think Buddhists the only ones to get this.
Whatever we'll have, we'll have,
all the great talk, passing the nun on a bicycle.
looking back at the old man, startled.
Shucking oysters. Cutting the hands
looking for pearls, what else?
Cynicism. The poor people--
they seem to like the church.
How the best stuff cuts both ways.
To be an honest woman.
Who says I'm not honest?
We have a good life, the three of us.
Why isn't that enough?
Who are you?
I am a Catholic worker.
Who are you?
You drink, you wet your pants, you vomit.
How could anyone love you?
I am not who I thought I was.
You look awful. That word. Awful.
I've been thinking
about who God
wants me to be in a
very lonely life.
(Title of her autobiography.
How faithful we are
serving the poor.)
Peter Maurin will lose the language
that I find online,
that I'll end with--
some unfinished business
for me at home--
The coat that hangs in
your closet
belongs to the poor.
Jim Bodeen
29 November--1 December 2017
VORTEX!
EXPERIENCE APPRENTICESHIP
How one works
depends upon
how one can work.
Where one is
and resources for slowing down.
When you can go slow
and for how long.
Can you stop.
And can you stay.
How long can you wait.
Because you have to keep moving.
Movement makes it possible, too.
What can be absorbed.
Stop and go.
Set and release.
Spaces in between
where vortex goes.
Vortex swirling.
Here now
we have seven nights
with bed and kitchen.
A detachable car.
Internet connections.
Museums, pink jeeps, and guides.
National monuments with storyboards.
Exile, voluntary and involuntary.
Volunteer storytellers.
Bookstores in National Parks
with the best books.
At Montezuma's Castle,
I have a choice. Stay with Kachina dolls,
take these books, carefully assembled here,
or, from Images of America,
expensive and superior local history?
How much energy available? To me?
I take the book on Sedona,
where we're driving to. Best history
on place I haven't been to yet.
Sandstone city named after a man's wife.
Taking it with these questions.
Will it open for me? And how?
Whose voice will it be.
In Sedona, after lunch, I try.
It doesn't work. But the jeep ride guide,
Pete, the one who says
I have new medications,
they're working and kicking in,
taking us over these rocks,
gives me the voice I need,
a half dozen details,
and a way into the book.
This is vortex for me this morning,
a swirling funnel of images
from yesterday, gathered mostly by others,
over time, thousands of years with people,
millions with the landscape,
gathered for me today
in luxury setting with the best coffee
in the world. It's all working.
Pete says this is his third day
on the job. Let's go.
Believe me. Vortex. A mass
of whirling fluid or air,
especially a whirlpool or whirlwind.
That fault line!
"We were caught in a vortex of water.
"We were in a pink jeep driving up red sandstone
"We were in a whirling vortex of smoke
Merging in traffic.
Traffic of book, ideas, voices.
Stopped in time, before time and after.
Dust from ocean floor raised by sheets
of tectonic plates into mountains
and worn down again. Cyclones,
eddies, maelstroms swirling.
Black hole of creation.
Vortex of the poem,
Ezra Pound
That one. That vortex.
A century long poem made new
triggered by a man driving a jeep.
Vortex is the art of movement itself.
A single image from ten thousand
daily frames, the swirl
of ecstatic sobriety
one man walking with one woman
over time's recording.
The practice!
Jim Bodeen
Sedona/Scottsdale, AZ
30 November 2017
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