BLESSINGWAY HAIKU
No talk, no inked words
A cup of contemplation
Sustenance gatha
Jim Bodeen
21 September 2021
HE/SHE READING SIGNS
HE/SHE READING SIGNS
He: Free wisdom
She: Teeth removed
Jim Bodeen
20 September 2021
Buffalo Pitts Steam Tractor Hike
1889 BUFFALO PITTS STEAM TRACTOR HIKE
Not a trail head, an Ag museum
between the gap, Union Gap--
start at the dump rake, sit
on rusty steel seat taking a portrait of my son,
50, standing behind me
up from eastern Sierras.
Drier than that here
with no lakes. Dry
and up with cheat grass
and just enough
switchbacks to lock
my knees in the heel-
toe climb. Take water.
At just under a mile.
Some of this is uphill.
Joke without a smile.
See these slides out there
straight ahead into Selah,
son asks father,,
raised here in mountains
and to mountains there,
showing me our valley.
Drought-sage-dry Yakima,
feminine hills beauty sensuous
and gold, pale-bleached vistas
to fence posts, barbed wire,
and power lines. What
are these I ask, these
cement-tight-and-roofed
structures square
with no windows. Enclosures
with a satellite dish. Telephone
telling us KATS FM, KIMA,
local tv stations,
Space--
hill top a mile-and-a-half high
an overlook
Two Gala apples fresh-picked
Yakima orchard crisp
What did you do
with your core?
Gave it to the scorched earth.
Crunchy peanut butter, frozen
blackberry jam sandwiches
Both sides of Union Gap
No mountains but I saw
that cloud coming from fire--
What I try and look for,
evidence not from the research of others.
Jim Bodeen
1 September 2021
LIVING ROOM NOTEBOOK MASK
LIVING ROOM NOTEBOOK MASK
!!!!!
Beginning with punctuation and smoke
!!
No keys, no bars, no guards.
Nobody in streets or yards
when you go out to get the mail.
The garden wants to be alone,
ignores you, as if to say,
Go back inside.
Checking Facebook,
a young woman in Michigan
dressed in an American flag,
protests the vaccine.
There’s that.
!!!
Smoke.
That song in your eyes, a romance.
Blowing smoke.
Got smoke?
Blow it up your ass
She was smoking, like hot.
He was going somewhere fast.
Here and gone.
The bear by the side of the road.
On the sign
delighting children.
Smoky.
!!!!
The ball game on tv that I lost interest in.
I wasn’t done with my comments to Rod.
Couldn’t send Not even to Alabama
Not to Mississippi, Goddamn!
Nina
Emailed myself the same question
What’s outside What’s inside
What inning we in
Which masks to where
Joy Harjo and her horses
I have some masks
Jim Bodeen
15 August 2021
Mountain Haiku
*
Ten days in the heart
Notebooks at high altitude
Travels with Karen
Three days in the Park
But what can match McGee Creek
Or Joy Harjo’s poems
Jim Bodeen
25 August 2021
Eastern Sierras
DAYS OF 20 PIES
DAYS OF 20 PIES
We would drive to farms and orchards.
We wore masks.
We listened to music
but we were without music ourselves.
These were the days of the temperatures
and burning trees
and plenty smoke
and we made pies.
Two stick double crusted pies.
Rhubarb, sweet cherry, sour cherry, blackberry,
blueberry—and from sunshine itself,
peach—I remember this--
there were 5 peach pies.
We quit counting at 20.
We were grieving and we made pies.
Jim Bodeen
14-15 August 2021
BOATS IN THE WATER: SONGS OF PRACTICE AND PREPARATION
SONGS OF PRACTICE AND PREPARATION
I. BOATS IN THE WATER
The boat comes from the museum shop
in Victoria, British Columbia, we were
celebrating our 50th anniversary,
Karen and I, and picked it out
calling for me to carry it
to Gary Higgins, one of Barry’s
deepest friends, hiker, companion
who carried the fire, Viet Nam
vet at the same time as me,
Tet, a marine, we shared
time and space—and we went
to the same high school,
north Seattle. He was two years
behind me, we didn’t know,
then. He’s prominent
in the hiking notebooks, early on.
He carried fire, heavy roots.
He was dying when we ferried
to Victoria. Crossing water.
I bought the boat for his crossing
and he had already disappeared
from us as we left the ferry.
Here, in Yakima, it’s hot, 99,
and I’m out back, having placed
wild Sock-eye Salmon fillets
on a soaked cedar plank, new
consumer item designed
during the time of droughts
to allow well-to-do North Americans
Sunday afternoons to pretend
they have native practices.
Wood charcoal pieces cut
side to side. I smell fish
on my fingers, grateful
as I lick them, drawing flies
to the sweetness of smoke.
Aroma comes from Weber Grill,
sweet cedar and salmon. Good
smoke, medicine smoke,
fighting for itself during a time
of big fires. Air vents mostly closed
keeping heat low. Higgins
is dying and we’ve lost contact,
unable to see him, the little boat
with its hand carved oars, now
a gift for his old friend, altered
and altared, sacred vessel
for the living. This was in the year
before the plague, I believe now
we have lost track of time before
the pandemic, such uncertainty
in these lines. I am drinking iced tea,
stems and branches from Japan,
a gift from Mayumi. This morning
I bicycled around the development
when temperatures were low,
mid 80s. For the past two weeks
I’ve been writing an essay--
an attempt—on a book of poems
on the weather, with hand-painted
international weather symbols
by an artist, the book called
Rain Violent, a collaboration
between mother and son.
The mother, Ann Spiers, the poet.
I have tasted the fish.
Nobody deserves a meal
like the one I am preparing here.
A small plane overhead. Everyone
lives indoors now. Smoky,
even beyond my garden full of large
trees, working hard to turn
toxins back into oxygen.
It is spooky. I believe
it is spooky for the large trees,
too, the Jaquemonte Birches,
Autumn Blaze canopied over us,
and the two Bloodgood Maples.
Large and small trees together.
The small ones bonsais in lovely pots,
suffering greatly in heat, suffering
and dying, their fired clay
serving as furnaces instead of beauty.
Clay boats for the journey,
reminding me of the time after
World War II, when Japanese gardeners
orphaned their trees to avoid suspicion
by the conquerors. Some of these,
survivors, have been restored
and collected by a community
of Japanese and American artists
in a new bonsai gallery near Seattle.
I have taken my grandchildren
to see these bonsais now under shade
of an old growth forest.
There is space for speechlessness
in any poem, if one goes slow enough.
When Barry came by, he gave me
a small book for my birthday.
Barry is the poet of birthdays
and he’s been bringing me poems
for 45 or 46 years. He’s practicing
The Art of Peace by Morihei Ueshiba,
founder of Aikido. The book
is smaller than your Iphone
and fits in its hollowed
glass screen like a passenger
in a cyber boat (I’m looking
at this now, broken circle brush
stroke on yellow paint.
We are not children, and we do
and we don’t practice like children.
We have the children’s love of repetition
as part of our practice. The salmon
has yielded up its flavor,
and the soaked, red cedar plank
it’s moisture and bouquet.
Karen and I will breathe this in
as I put on my gloves
and take this dark treasure-pink
sweetness inside to our table.
Our table of gratitude a blessingway.
The neighborhood, is, to be frank,
also spooky, and needs to be sung for
and blessed, prayed over,
if that is your language.
I’m bringing in another here,
entering the house, a threshold,
the singer Frank Mitchell,
buried in Chinle, Arizona. He
is a Navajo Blessingway Singer,
and his way is to sing us whole,
perhaps you’ve felt his presence
in this poem. He is here
from start to finish. He’s singing
for Gary and all of us. This way,
a way of peace, a way of practice,
you might call another way
of being the same way, however
one gets to source, and one, and peace.
Peace and blessings to all living things.
Jim Bodeen
3-6-9 August 2021
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