Showing posts with label California. Show all posts
Showing posts with label California. Show all posts

Thursday, October 21, 2021

A Place to Live

I did not dream I was
assembling an encyclopedia
of all the dreams I'd dreamed.

I did dream an old dream
of searching for a place to live
in of all places Davis California--
wandering in a warm anxious
night of delta breezes,
pressed but plodding--
my usual anti-style.
I never find the place, nor
the elusive seminar 
in German that will allow
me to finish the Ph.D.--
retroactively. Short breaths
and writing wake me. 

I've planned
tonight to dream about your
dream--that spectacular one,
full of light--vibrant street
stirring, with that strange
person in a dark cafe 
who asks to know all about
your life but won't listen. 

If this doesn't sound like
something you'd dream,
please tell your subconscious
mind to text me
from the Cloud, and I will
explain further, but the main
thing is I hope you've 
found a place to live. 


hans ostrom 2021

Saturday, January 5, 2019

At the End of an Old Year in Pacifica

    (New Year's Eve, 2018, Pacifica)

As the people
in the loud house
toast something
or other, a dog
stands among them,
eager to find
actionable meaning
in a human sound
or gesture. The
people know what
many words and gestures
mean, and this creates
a burden the dog
will never know.
All gathered are
mammals on the edge of
a coast. In its way
that is something to toast.


hans ostrom 2019

Sunday, January 14, 2018

At a Reservoir of Inquiry

Warm winter day at
a California university:
this one's origins lie
in agriculture. Between
academic terms, the campus
is deserted. Squirrels

maintain their studious
consumption of acorns
raining from valley oaks
that have mused over
millions of scholars
down the decades.

One squirrel runs
up the steps of the Success
Center, which is closed.
The current campus
populace will flood in
soon, filling the reservoir
of inquiry as feudal
stupidity reigns on the
other side of the continent.



hans ostrom 2018

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

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

I Like Missing

I like missing California. Do
you? I like California twilights,
blue. And perfume of the women,
swoosh, going by. And the going by,
the gone. I miss the gone,
the streetlights popping on,
Chevy Impalas as low-to-asphalt
as lizards. And I like

missing bitter smoke of burnt
alfalfa fields & also
valley oaks never seeming
to move, great clouds
of black-green. And I like
missing everything that's
wrong-careening and wrong,
excessive and wrong, about it,
about it all, the bursting
all of California, God
help us.



hans ostrom 2013

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Gary Snyder's Birthday Today

It is Gary Snyder's birthday today. My favorite books of poems by him is The Back Country. He was born in San Francisco in 1930.

Here is a brief selection from his nonfiction book, The Practice of the Wild:

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

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Rhode Island's Poet Laureate

Here is a link to a nice article by Annie-Laurie Hogan about Rhode Island's Poet Laureate, Lisa Silverberg Starr:

http://media.www.ramcigar.com/media/storage/paper366/news/2008/03/07/News/R.i-Poet.Laureate.Shares.Poetry.Advice.At.Readwrite.Series-3258082.shtml

Being from the geographically massive state of California, I would have been tempted--in high school, let's say--to wonder if poets from Rhode Island had to write small poems like haiku. Luckily, I graduated from high school, and many, many moons ago, I moved to a geographically modest state (in spite of features like Puget Sound and volcanoes like Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Rainier), Washington.

Congratulations and good luck to Lisa Starr, and here's a tip of the cursor to Rhode Island and that fascinating figure, Roger Williams.