Perversity and Defiance

BASEMENT READINGS

Surprises in his own road

came in the basement

of the church

where he slept with the men

in a small room

monitored,

breath and wonder mixed,

such a privilege

to be with these men

giving everything

they have

to make it

through the night

Jim Bodeen

30 December 2015

LETTER TO HARRY MARTINSON

FROM THE HOMELESS SHELTER

IN THE BASEMENT OF A LUTHERAN CHURCH

CREATED BY EMMIGRANTS OUT WEST

“He who walks the roads should be unarmed.”

            Harry Martinson, The Road, Nobel Laureate

Self-taught Swede I repeated jokes about you

before I knew your name. Orphan from the Parish

turned seaman, turned nomad, you spoke for tramps

becoming one, and becoming one, emerged singular,

and superior to the sanitized, those who stayed

home. Damning too, the efficient and organized.

I find you late in life by accident, trying to know

Scandinavian homeland through books. Your road

in tramp-time walks the poet’s way

half a century later. Other, outcast,

breaker and challenger of norms and stereotypes,

objective portrayer of the outsider,

tramp real and romantic. What is real,

stubbornness of the human spirit raised

to such heights, delighting where it touches

down, and more, touching what’s tender

and thin in human pretense. “In defiance

of his defiance he opened his mind

and let it be illuminated by his best thoughts

that he could remember, by all the best

of what he had seen and heard.”

Add the cost of defiance:

it takes twice as much out of you.

Your tramp is the poet on the way,

becoming true poet. Your poet,

the tramp on the way of the true road.

It is the poet who sees the back side

of the moon. The urge to witness,

the need to see, and walk and be.

Poet and tramp merge, becoming then,

this: “…like a clock which no longer

believes in its action.” A poet’s image

and the tramp’s reality. You knew,

and know, real, Harry Martinson.

Fear in everyone. What you see of fear

has been recorded, is true. And from

across time, I praise your time

with men you walked with. Fierce call.

“I have been sent to count the grasshoppers.”

“And I promise never to pretend to be somebody.”

“And to be perverse to perversity.”

Discovering truth in silence. Tramping

as a way of life. Embarrassment to America,

then and now, without contrition.

The incurably ill the only ones

embracing openly. Excess exposing

excess, loving humility. Unarmed.

Speaking, wallowing in truth, the big all.

In deep admiration,

Jim Bodeen

20-30 December 2015

To High Camp Lodge We Go with Dheezus and Sam

Singing their way on skis. The cousins.

SKIING WITH GRANDCHILDREN

takes the grandfather into the world of motherhood

and generosity. Skiing with grandchildren

gives the grandfather atonement on a platter of wonder.

What has been forgiven by God will breathe

through the children in great gulps of gratefulness.

Jim Bodeen

27 December 2015

Homelessness Candle Light Vigil Yakima

Homeless Persons Memorial Day: The first night of winter. The longest night of the year. Sponsored by Yakima Neighborhood Health Services in partnership with the Homeless Network of Yakima County. In memory of the deceased.

Solstice Snow Shelter

SOLSTICE SNOW SHELTER

Joe shows up

with his feet

wrapped in tinfoil

You have a soft spot

in your heart for Joe?

Nothing opens

until 9 so

we keep moving

most spend time

looking for snipe.

Snipe?

That’s Homeless

for hunting

half-smoked cigarettes

Jim Bodeen

24 December 2015

Breathing with the Men

BREATHING WITH THE MEN

Enter the shelter room

your first night and take your lead

from the men. Get your gear

into your tote box,

(You can’t keep anything

that won’t fit in your tote),

and mark a mattress on the floor.

Note how the men fit the corners

under the edges, and spread their blankets.

It’s still early, but it’s also late.

It took these guys most of what they had

to get through the day. Perhaps your day,

also, was a bit like theirs. They’re tired.

You’re not one of the homeless, not by definition.

Los desamparados. The homeless.

Living in cars or vehicles. From sofa to sofa.

Places that aren’t adequate for people to live in.

Un individuo sin hogar permanente.

You, yourself, may have never slept on the street,

much less under a bridge.

Maybe though, because of your good fortune

you know that poem of Rilke’s, Autumn.

If so, and you think of it, that might make you

think twice. We all are falling. Or this,

from Autumn Day: Who’s homeless now,

will for long stay alone. You know,

if you know this poem, the poet’s talking

about one who is at home in his body,

one who has completed his poem, if you will.

His house is built. If you don’t know your own soul,

you won’t like this poem, restlessly wandering

from work to store. From store to home

doing chores. Perhaps attending Church on Sunday.

You are not one of the homeless.

You have a home. You made your bed.

Lay down on the mattress now.

The men are already asleep.

Six of them tonight. You’re the seventh son.

You’re with five of the six from last night.

One is new. You haven’t met him.

It did take everything they had to get here.

To get through the day.

You don’t ask them where they’ve been.

What they did. You’re on your back,

hands behind your head on the pillow.

There’s no pillow case. Cool, like rubber.

Breathe yourself. Breathe with the men,

and listen to them breathe. Listen

to the men breathing. You are practiced in this.

You listen to your wife breathing. It comforts you.

This is different. That’s true, too.

They’re breathing hard now.

Breathing, farting, rolling on the mattresses.

All of these mattresses on the floor

in an unused room in the church.

You are breathing and farting yourself.

Breathing and farting with the men.

Rolling now, trying to find a fit on the mattress.

Now your arms crossing over your chest. How odd.

You don’t do that at home. Home?

Aren’t you home where you’re at?

There was heat in the room when you entered,

but it’s been turned off. It’s cold outside

and getting colder. The floor is cold

and the mattress is cold. You get up

and go to your tote. You’re still in your jeans

and you go to get your coat. Sleeping in your Levis?

You put your coat over your chest, underneath the blanket.

You close your eyes and listen.

You don’t think about a thing.

You have come to this evening, a finished man.

You don’t know what to say.

You try not to name it.

Jim Bodeen

16-18 December 2015

What the Cigar Makers Say

FOUR COUNT THURSDAY

Table club athletes

Waiting for Karen on stairs

Work we do in snow

Shoveling sidewalk

Sleeping homeless on mattress

Toes hike boots dry

What day is day

And where you do joy in walk

Why each precious step

Through snow walking

Footprints quieting bullshit

Nothing doing

Jim Bodeen

17 December 2015

TWO MEN

Living from sofa to sofa

the man didn’t know

he was without a home,

neither did the man

who owned the sofa.

Jim Bodeen

16 December 2015

TASKS BEFORE THE DAY

My friend outlines

the day’s chores,

adding, After 2

I’ll write some poems.

Jim Bodeen

15 December 2015

REMEMBERING HYMNS OF A NORTH DAKOTA CHILDHOOD

STAR OF WONDER, STAR OF LIGHT, WHILE AT MY GRAND DAUGHTER’S 

PIANO RECITAL 60-SOME YEARS LATER,

I LEAN TOWARDS MY WIFE WITH THE FOUND POEM

I’VE BEEN CARRYING ACROSS TIME WITH THIS CONFESSION

We three kings of orient are,

tried to smoke a rubber cigar,

it was loaded, it exploded,

following yonder star.

Jim Bodeen

14 December 2015

READING DECEMBER

“The heroic singer of tradition is blind. The NEW singer in this present must be sighted.”

            Allen Grossman How To Do Things With Tears

“…for he had re-cast within himself all that people understand by losing their bearings.”

            Harry Martinson, The Road

Highway 12, washed out, flooded,

keeps me from the mountains

and off skis, waxed with an old iron

and set behind this chair.

You can tell a teacher anything

and I’m writing my fourth grade teacher.

researching midges,

the small 2-winged fly

that swarms near water. They come up

in the Harry Martinson novel, The Road,

that came from interlibrary loan. Hand-made

crafted cigars have just been replaced

by those made by machine—women

make extra money with snuff recipes,

and cigarettes are on their way in.

This is a book about a tramp,

tramping, a vagabond Swede

telling about the America boat.

A million Swedes emigrating

between 1850 and 1913, those years

when prairie towns where I come from

got their start with the railroad.

In that neck of the plains, now,

frakking and diaspora—while in woods

out West everybody’s buying guns.

North Dakotans cradle guns

in pickups because badgers eat grain

bagged but not collected. My children

in marriage fight over owning assault weapons.

You know by now, midges bring

no cause for tears, or rage.

These automatic weapons aren’t on tv news.

Go into the gun shop and put down your money

no questions asked assault rifle placed in your hands

but you can’t walk out with the .45

until you show your concealed weapon permit.

Martinson’s tramp’s name is Bolle.

Cradling the inexpensive binding

with yellowed pages, he speaks across time,

Fear was the world’s greatest problem,

and the tramp’s greatest problem

was the fear of fear. My brother who grew up

in Alabama playing ball, returns in pilgrimage,

tells of two stops—the 16^th Avenue Baptist Church,

where Jesus Christ is the Main Attraction,

Birmingham, where the bomb exploded, Sunday,

September 15, 1963, at 10:22 a.m.

killing four young girls in Sunday School,

and the Muscle Shoals Sound Museum

on the Tennessee River, where Rick Hall

recorded Jimmy Hughes singing Steal Away

and Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman.

I was 18 years old when that Church was bombed.

This year, 2015, there’s been a mass murder

in these United States of America

every day of the year. Wilson Pickett

recorded the Beatles singing, Hey Jew,

and nobody noticed. Divine some of this

when you throw your I Ching coins.

That teacher in 4^th grade. Teacher turned

farmer’s wife—poet who knows small town

sadness and grief, I’ve read her poems,

lines for those who stayed, and the ones who left,

and I’m writing her letters, inspired

in part by that Swedish emigration,

the one going on now, in Syria,

Martinson says Sweden abandoned entire towns.

My teacher, she’s in her 80s now,

Her student, this old man writing,

is nine years old again, bawling

at the teacher’s desk fact-full, delirious

in front of classmates, un-ashamed.

Jim Bodeen

12 December 2015

THIS IS WHAT THE CIGAR MAKERS SAY

It is as though they have been consulting the I Ching.

Whose way is it? Yours? David Hinton’s?

Nothing doing that way. Uh uhh.

Waiting in the Kmart parking lot

for my daughter to drop off my grand daughter

sick with a cold, Grandpa day.

December sun comes up

through Union Gap,

while Leonard Cohen sings,

I’ll be yours for a song.

Jim Bodeen

11 December 2015