Showing posts with label dusk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dusk. Show all posts

Thursday, January 25, 2024

Wine-Red Clouds at Twilight

Red-wine-soaked clouds
at dusk sing an intoxicated anthem
of light to summon such 
night creatures as raccoons,
bats, cats, and certain devotees
of Charles--Baudelaire
and Bukowski, those bad boys.
Sing, you wine-dark sacks 
of rain. Sing!


Hans Ostrom 2024

Thursday, April 27, 2023

Assessing an Evening

What evens at evening?
A dog's barking takes bites
out of quiet. In their buildings,
people cook, drink, take medicine,
talk, give up, rage, look at screens.

Outside, birds have returned
to nests and perches, warming
each other, silencing caw, shriek,
whistle, and song. I decide to use
all this information as evidence

of local equilibrium at dusk,
something that's fine by me.
I'm more weary than optimistic.


hans ostrom 2023

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Selfish

Twilight: sky brighter than landscape,
which backs slowly into darkness.
Crows fly home, high for them. They
become wrinkled, animated black lines.

So much is wrong out there--
the city, the nation, the world.
One feels ashamed, obligated, compelled,
and weary. This evening I give in

greedily to privilege, sit outside with
headphones on, listening to Ellington
indigos, "Solitude," "Prelude to a Kiss,"
"Mood Indigo," a cover of "Autumn Leaves."

In my heaven, Duke is musical director.
September air, influenced by Puget Sound,
mixes with dimming light sublimely. Yes,
I said "sublimely." Insufferable.

I want for nothing except more commitment
to change some bad things.
How disgusting to write about oneself
at a time like this.


hans ostrom 2015





Friday, February 1, 2013

Twice-Believing Creatures



Twice-Believing Creatures


Crickets sing the word "ceasing" electronically
in dirt and dry stalks.
A heavy black beetle turns his belly
to the cosmos, plucks with his six feet
at the needles of a darkening pine bough.
The Magician dances out of straw. He is Dusk;
he juggles the sun and the moon and the evening star.

Here and there a few are alert,
some curious, some thankful--like the deer,
weary of swishing horseflies away
from their backsides all day and hungry
after the heavy afternoon;--like the raccoon,
waddling off to make a living at the pond's edge;
--and the tireless child, the old man
who stands near his garden listening to the corn grow,
and the woman with her hands folded,
singing out loud to nobody.

They know that dusk takes today's body
and brings another after an interlude of dreaming.
They know nothing of the sort;
they are as dubious as the light at dusk.
They know the world to be as new
as the note of a gnat in the ear, as old
as the lizard's dry smirk,
a boulder's personality, darkness.


Hans Ostrom, 2013