Showing posts with label 1970s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1970s. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Lunar Eclipse Seen from the Central Valley

(California: April 1979)


 We sipped tequila from a bottle,
saw a shadow push into the moon,
which took on a planet’s gravitas,
losing its varicose craters, its

coin’s gloss.  Then its yellow
turned brown and red enough
to make a farmer look at it
as arable space. We enjoyed

the eclipse’s math and chance,
tried to focus binoculars
using a rooftop TV antenna
as approximative point.

We tried to shape our minds
around such fear and magic
as hunters/gatherers
may have felt. We failed.

We joked, and after midnight,
we opened doors of our several
abodes in a college-town stucco
hive.  We set clocks,

listened to household engines,
to music from vinyl undulating on a
turn-table like glassy harbor
water. Our dreams orbited desire.




Hans Ostrom 1979/2017

Saturday, December 7, 2013

"1970s Spasm"

Hey, man--hey, you net-box jumper
and rainbow-thumper.
I'm seeing
albums raining down without their
covers. I mean thousands
of black albums coming on in
like swarthy, thin UFOs. ("It
just means it's unidentified,
okay? You need to fucking
lay back, man.") And I see now
the complex map of my life
is being etched by a diamond
needle, digging into undulant
vinyl, shined on by blue
lava-light. Hey, play the
other side, play the other
side, hey play--oh, okay,
cool. (It's getting cold.)
Nice tuner! I need a beer.


hans ostrom 2013

Monday, January 28, 2013

Nude Up and Get in a Pile

It may have been a line
from North Dallas Forty.
Anyway, we’d quote it
at the bar and laugh.
The thing is, pre-AIDS,
you might think you
were headed home
in a silver Camaro after
the bars closed
in California’s inimitable
Central Valley.  Then you might
stop at a red light, two lanes,
and two women you knew
barely might laugh, roll
down the window, and
suggest, “Follow us.”
And, wow, there you’d be,
nuded up and in, no,
not a pile, but an expansive
naked arrangement of
three or four or five.
It was a gas, a blast, a trip:
listen to the lingo change
down the ages. Olive oil
on large breasts, the
several positions, good
clean fun. Of course, in
an apartment of your brain,
you knew the party had
to end—that night; and for you;
and for a generation.  Microbes,
maturity, and so on. None-
the-less: at the stop-light,
in a Camaro, a little loaded
on whiskey and weed and
maybe a line: the light,
the spark, of mischief.
Good clean fun in
an era everybody and
his mother, as we said,
would not just forget but
not know existed.

*
*
hans ostrom 2013

Friday, January 30, 2009

Fine With Me






"Fine" is one of those multiply deployed words in the language that depend, obviously, on different definitions, connotations, and rhetorical situations but also on slight shifts of tone. You might ask someone, "So, how's it going?" And s/he might say, "Fine," but precisely how the person says "fine" determines the meaning. S/he can say it wearily and, without going so far as irony or sarcasm, s/he can turn the meaning of fine into "not fine." Another tone of voice might suggest that the person doesn't want to reveal how he or she is doing, how it's going, so then "Fine" means "end of inquiry." Anyway, I was thinking about some of this as I fooled around with a poem.



Finery



There's a fine line between
saying there's a fine line
between two things and refusing
to say such a thing. In this case,
"fine" means not "excellent" but
"extremely thin."


Some people say, "Fine, then!"
when they're angry and want
to bring an episode of some kind
to an end, which in Latin is "fine."


In the end, a fine is indeed an
imposition, especially if it costs
a lot of money, as opposed to
being a finely calibrated token.
A fine plus jail-time seems
almost infinitely harsh.


"Finery" refers to clothing,
"refined" to manners,
but "refinery" to petroleum
and such. It's as if at some crucial
linguistic moment, someone said,
"Fine, then!" and the denotations
went their separate ways. Go
figure. Better yet, cut a fine figure;
the latter seems to refer to beauty,
not to cutting. "She's so fine,"
I remember some men saying,

of women, in the semi-fine
decade of the 1970s. I cannot
remember the last time I heard
anyone say "fine and dandy,"
and I'm perfectly fine with that.
*
Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom