Showing posts with label London. Show all posts
Showing posts with label London. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 7, 2024

Bloomsbury Park

 (September 2022)


Bloomsbury Park
isn't melting yet
in the plump heat
of London, late summer.

A locust tree
shows tendons
and bends like an
arm at the elbow.

The only birds
are pigions. Brown
plates of stone make
a center square

and we strangers
sit on black benches.
We're mostly mute.
Cornflowers persist--

the rest of the beds
are parched like a
hangover. On my way
out, one pigeon escorts

me to the gate. We say our
forms of goodbye. I wonder
if one of his ancestors
spoke to Virginia Woolf.

Monday, January 29, 2024

At Paddington Station

At Paddington Station, in a tunnel
just off the platforms, you want to capture
images of faces & bodies with memory
not camera--the ancient pickling mode.
Impossible. Commuting workers

stride with purpose verging on menace.
Tourists--sluggish, confused, quarrelsome,
sweaty, laden. . . . The tunnel space
seems eager to ingest people (it has
seen them all already, the Alis and
the Bens, the Antonios, Angelikas,
and Vlads, the Prufrocks, Sukis,
Eriks, and Khans). Such tunnels

snake like arteries through urban
bodies, delivering toil to the maw
of the Economy, serving sweat-labor
and schticks of expertise, nutrients
of the perpetual Now. The proper

English woman's voice narrates
train-info ("with breakfast service
to Swansea"), a positive-thinking
pigeon head-thrusts into the mix,
content with crumbs. What a seething

thing is a big city, but every person
is still one person, loaded with duty,
aches, words, terrors, whole worlds
of thought hiding behind stoic faces. 
A mind among millions, holding on,
holding off insanity and defeat.

A large sign states WAY OUT. Its
message is a mirage. And so it is
if you're a certain you, you'll enter
stage-lit platorms to board a serpent-
snouted Great Wester Railway train
to Cardiff, from where you'll go to
Aberdare in search of dark grey

headstones and places where
the dead once walked, worked,
and wondered. They couldn't see
your present, the future. You can't
see their past, that present.
Ghost trains roll
by each other silently on tracks
laid down by Time. 

hans ostrom 2024

Tuesday, December 19, 2023

Regina

 t the Rosewood Hotel, London

Regina, of the hotel's front desk,
I like the way you write your name.
Your printing looks both regal
and tentative. You made the word
you made sincerely. It's your name.

Regina, of the helpful suggestions,
I like your lovely, narrow face,
your way of talking about Portugal,
your homeland, and how you speak
English fast when you come out

from behind the desk to tell us
about an exhibition at the Tate Modern,
and to tell us you're and artist
and tell us your parents encouraged
your art. Regina, artist.


hans ostrom 2023

Sunday, October 1, 2023

London, 2023

A brisk but polite flow
of people on sidewalks, in cars.
Yelling and honking--rare.
Women everywhere, from
everywhere: how splendid.

A sturdiness of old kept-up
buildings--like thick, healthy
urban bones. Conversations
that include listening and evidence.
Reading, valued. Few symptoms
of sick rage. A relative

freedom from guns, which now
hold American well being hostage--
a pistol to the national head.
A certain lust for gardens
and the farms beyond. A troubling
dearth of birds. Except for

pigeons, who have become
full citizens (I love them). An
adequacy, at least, of bookstores.
Calm news-readers, free
from pressurized speech
and false drama. Loquacious
cab-drivers with comic schticks.

A healthy getting-on-with-it.