HE LOOKS AT SHREDS OF HIS ANCESTRAL PAST

DREAMING ICE HOUSE SANCTUARY

Scouting snow solstice
Sun-tipped wild
Tucked into paradise

Jim Bodeen
20 December 2013

ON RECEIVING THIS DAY: SABBATH POEMS
BY WENDELL BERRY, FROM A FRIEND

       —for Lee Bassett

Sunday Morning. Karen leaves early
to ring bells for early service. Sister Sadie Sadie,
The old dog, arthritic, sleeps by the fire at my feet.
The old poet calls himself Lowdown,
In his opening prayer, This Day,

Being about time always coming up short
In time's own world. I begin here, before
Reading the last poem in the book,
Mad Farmer returning to close out the present,
Recalling an early image of Christ in a barn.

From here, he steps out,
And I turn again to his first Sabbath poems
From the mid-70s. The poet sits
Through fears and songs of critters
Among trees, until he hears

His own song. Here is where we met,
And when, my dear friend, decades past,
Setting out for silence, and failing.
The poet Wendell Berry
Gives up two words: Spirit and wild,

Carrying comfort and convention.
We're the ones out of control.
It is the Second Sunday in Advent.
The first reading from Isaiah:
Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist.

Jim Bodeen
December 10, 2013

HE TRANSLATED POEMS FROM EVERY SHRED

OF HIS ANCESTRAL PAST ON HIS WAY TO HAFEZ

When the movie and love-making are over

the night remains clear, and sky opens

for poems of Robert Bly. One has only

to find one word and childhood returns.

Cistern appears and I am six, descending

basement stairs of the Victorian House

owned by Great Northern Railway,

grasslands from Saskatchewan protecting

our family from wind. I’m sitting

on the second step in winter, basement

below me, wood steps winding the way

around a mysterious cache of water.

Sitting between worlds. Get to Hafez

in Shiraz by going through North Dakota.

By pass Minneapolis. Take the door

from the kitchen to the basement. Bly

unlocks his revolutionary past through Denmark.

He says the roof of the house will last the night,

and all poems end in gratitude. The hidden center

unexpressed by the poet himself holds the key.

Remove the links tying poems to occasion.

I could not have done this work on my own.

One can be reborn by reading the Gospel

in a second language. Counting the heavens

in Robert Bly’s poems leaves a man dizzy.

Jim Bodeen

8 November-18 December 2013

Thanking Robert Bly on Thanksgiving

A NOTE TO MY SON ON THE MOUNTAIN WRITTEN

ON THE INSIDE OF A BOOK COVER AT CHRISTMAS

These books come your way

used, from places around the country.

I had them once and gave them away.

Giving them to you now, reminded

of their beauty, there’s nothing specific

I have in mind, no how to nuggets,

though there’s weather and mountains

in titles, that’s not it; neither

do I give a damn if you keep a journal

or write. Still there’s risk involved,

William Stafford only appears safe.

Whether you read them or not,

these books are the most dangerous

gifts pulled from a father’s backpack.

Love, Dad

December, 2013

CONVERSATION ABOUT THE SHOEMAKER

OUTSIDE THE TEMPLE DOORS OF THE EMPIRE

What else could he do with all that money

but buy football uniforms and helmets?

He could buy toilets

for the people who make the shoes.

Jim Bodeen

4 December 2013

LINES TO ROBERT BLY ON DAYS

LEADING UP TO ANOTHER BIRTHDAY

By midnight// The stars had already become huge talkers.

            Robert Bly “Looking at the Stars”

The two volume biography

of Wallace Stevens sits at my feet Robert Bly,

along with the Modern Library edition of his poems and prose;

twenty-some years ago, it was Iron John

bringing me to senses in ways

confounding modern medicine. It’s thanks,

giving, and abundance I send to you

this evening, stolen sugar from the empire

in green tea. You remain one of the shepherds,

angry at our lazy church, and turning

towards 70, I remain a boy from North Dakota,

writing from a shack on wheels, tucked

among trees on a winter beach

off the Oregon coast, your translations

with their winged energy delighting me

as rain tap tap taps on the flat roof

of the mothership. Rain now in its third day.

My wife and I warm ourselves under covers

reading to each other, looking at pictures.

Sometimes your comments between poets

make me one with the rain, weeping.

We have covered much of the same territory,

but as I’ve said, I’m from North Dakota.

Dry land farming and all. The Lutherans

didn’t have the same ambition in our town.

Perhaps God became clear to us only in severity,

competing as he had to with those closer stars.

We talk slower, and our humor’s dry as winter wheat,

part of our response to being laughed at

on all sides of all borders. And Minnesota,

with those lakes stealing an image from the Chinese.

When Minnesotans entered the room,

we were taught to keep our heads down.

You were exotic, on television, distance exaggerated.

Your birth poem catches me off guard,

December 23, 1926. I hope you’re well.

Your voice arrives like Grandpa’s, on time.

I fight for this sound every day of my life.

The dark one, Krishna, walking with Jesus,

together in translations at winter solstice,

before the ocean, all of us, here,

watching whales in a winter storm.

Jim Bodeen

26 November 2013

Tsagaglalal, Coyote & Alan Storey

Breathing with Karen, Stretching Time

ON REFUSING ALL OF THE SMOOTH STONES

IN THE RIVER’S TUMBLING JUST OUT OF TOWN

Maybe what remains is the elegy.

This odd turn towards the camera

with moving parts.

Seeing the beloved like this

in her one moment.

On the Washington side of the Columbia River

through Stevenson.

Explain that one to Meriweather Lewis.

A day drive.

Over Blewett Pass, Karen asks me

if I want to stop at St. John the Forerunner Monastery

and buy some cheese cake from the nuns.

Like Bly says in his Big Book,

Even your parents can’t believe how much you’ve changed.

When he began lifting fist-sized stones

from rivers, he couldn’t recall, exactly.

It was Sunday. He’d brought grandchildren,

and the first stone came from the glacier’s snout,

shattered glass. He collapsed the riverbed

in his garden, tracking an ancestral story.

Jim Bodeen

26 November 2013

LINES FOR A SOLITARY POET

            —for B

Looking for a way through a lifetime

of the poet’s translated poems,

underlining, lines as cairns

in landscapes of the other,

otherness part of what’s here,

part of what’s lonesome and untold,

part of it, too, lines accumulate

until land and sky come clear.

This is a solitary poet.

He lays down his pen, and as the poem

emerges, the poet himself gets smaller.

It’s not Robert Bly who makes a poet great.

Neither is it the Nobel Prize.

These lines are morning bird songs

from Tomas Tranströmer, his own work

pushing him from the nest.

Discipline of practice, way of solitaries

on birthdays bowing to daily lines.

Stark contrast from the awards dinner,

escapes through bathroom windows.

Jim Bodeen

8 November 2013

MOVEMENT IN THE MOTHERSHIP

In the womb of the Goddess

Breathing is another word for praise

Jim Bodeen

19 November 2013

Contrary to Human Wisdom: Thanking God & Making Art

Seeking Refuge: A Pastor For Kierkegaard (+playlist)

The Great Mother of the World

RIGHT AWAY AT 3 am


The Great Mother of the World has taken up residency
in the body of my wife, Karen. I have been assigned to take her
wherever she may wish to go. For consenting to this, to be,
among other things, her driver. It is my privilege
to accompany her in the Mothership.
For awhile, perhaps, I was under the illusion
that it was the other way around.
I was a fool to think so. In the language of the world
I would be done for.
Done, as the world calls it, over with.
Right now I'm trying to sleep, and she says,
"Turn on the light. Wake up."
I turn on the light.
She's sleeping on her side, turned away from me.
Actually, she's snoring. "Wake up." she says it again.
"Pay attention. The headache is only temporary."

Jim Bodeen
13 November 2013