Showing posts with label Sierra Buttes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sierra Buttes. Show all posts

Thursday, July 24, 2014

"Sierra Buttes," by Hans Ostrom


The Sierra Buttes
are what Cubism
had wanted to be:
a multi-planed,
sui generis impro-
vization, a force
of nature admired
as an object d'arte.

Up were the plates
thrust in the patient
geological crash.
Then came the mother
tongue, ice, which

ultimately withdrew
(think how slowly),
leaving this grand
stone assemblage,
this blue-jazz
diorite peak
with no peak,
instead a bulbous
massif.

Every different angle
invents a new Buttes
(plurality in the
singularity of the
plural singular),
each resulting in

an entirely different
understanding of
"the Sierra Buttes."
Standing in the town
of Sierra City,
one notices that
looking up
creates in humans
uncomfortable planes
for the head and the

neck. And it is
no wonder that people
who live in
Sierra City and other
small mountain-towns
around our
geological globe
tend to
develop highly original
designs for calamity,
have crafted
grand existential comedies--
forces of life
that may never
be shaped into art.

For there is no answer
to the mountain,
there is no solution
to how the Sierra Buttes
trivialize
human endeavor,
or so think humans
(this is drama
on our scale)
as they consider
the mountain the
mountain.


hans ostrom 2014



Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Bear Nearby

Bear Nearby

Tonight a bear's at the perimeter,
beyond where cabin-lights dissolve.
The animal breaks brush and gulps air,
snorts, working hard, and we hear this.
We glance up at Ursa Major above
the Sierra Buttes, a risen massif.

We figure the bear's breaking down
an apple tree now and gorging--wild
and deliberate, focused and irascible.
We don't walk closer. The bear doesn't
advance. There's a distance to be kept.

There's a fascination in the dark,
which entertains a big invisible mammal
whose family's lived here since before
any human named constellations or
eavesdropped on night's business.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom