Showing posts with label ballads. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ballads. Show all posts

Monday, April 29, 2019

The Very Nowness of You

 ("The Very Thought of You," a
ballad composed by Ray Noble)


The nowness of you
in your motion and thinking,
the present rectitude of your
existence, with earrings, as
it happens (it happens)--
this is separate from our life
together. Our life together
is an invisible sculpture
representing our ideas
and memories of us. It's
exhibited in the gallery of days.
The you right-now-here is
someone and something
to be discovered, and it seems
I just discovered you one
more time. I find it quite exciting.


hans ostrom 2019


Monday, May 11, 2009

Corresponding With Nostalgia


Nostalgia's a fact of life because it springs from routine, it provides an easy if illusory alternative to bothersome change, and it may be legitimately related to things that worked pretty well in our lives. Things in the past were not necessarily worse, even though our tendency is to over-estimate them (arguably).
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In my case, an example of the latter (things worked all right) would be . . . the post office. In a relatively remote mountain-town, the post-office provided one obvious link to the world at large. It provided one of the most stable routine's of the day--going to get the mail.
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I inherited my father's 1969 Ford F-100 pickup, which I am steadily refurbishing but not restoring; he purchased it new, and by 1997, when we left us, he had put fewer than 50,000 miles on it. Here's a rough guess: at least 25% of those miles were put on when he drove the truck to town to "get the mail." (We had no rural delivery, except of a newspaper or two.) The round-trip was probably around 3 miles.
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I also remember liking the musty smell of the old post office; oddly enough, my dad helped build the new post-office (which is now old), including a nice stone-facade in which he embedded venerable gold-mining implements. I also liked the highly ritualized transactions of buying stamps, getting mail-orders, opening the wee mailbox, and so on.
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One ritual that still obtains in the town is that, when someone dies--especially after a long illness and even if they have moved away--someone attaches a notice of the event to the glass doors of the post office. Email and voice-mail have yet to replace this mode of communication that precedes an official obituary.
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Post-offices still seem busy, but I suspect they're far less busy with personal correspondence, which is delivered via various incarnations of phones and computers (and phones are computers). At the same time, neuroscientists might argue (I guess) that nostalgia is a matter of electrons, too--located in the electrical wiring of our brains.
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A wee ballad, at any rate (and postal rates always go up; why, in my day, a stamp cost only . . .):
*
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Corresponding With Nostalgia
*
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The correspondence used to be
Composed of pulp and ink,
Now seems elaborate and slow,
Indeed antique, I think.
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The mail comes digitally now,
Encoded on the air.
Yes, personality persists.
And no, it itsn't fair
*
To say we write robotically.
The wait and weight of post--
The palpability of what
I read, I miss the most.

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Yet now I'm totally plugged in,
Am tethered to my screens.
I send and post, receive and text.
("Text" now's a verb, it seems.)
*
A letter to Nostalgia, yes:
I think that's what I'll write.
It will come back: "No such address."
Electrons are Nostalgia's site.
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Ballad of the Micro-Town












[the photo is of Sierra City, California, population 225, elevation @ 4,250 feet above sea level]





Ballad of the Micro-Town


The mountains round that town are sheer
Massifs of stone. The town
Lies glinting like a coin below.
The river carves a frown.

I grew up there, so it was all.
It was the world to me.
That it and I were less than small
I'd learn eventually.

To have grown up in a small town
Is such a micro-fate,
A shrunken destiny, at best,
A morsel of time's bait.

If you are from a micro-town,
Bravo to you from me.
Our origins have blessed us with
Well known obscurity.



Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008