Showing posts with label trees. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trees. Show all posts

Sunday, March 12, 2023

Birch Tree

Let's shelve the angst and see the old
birch tree, leafless, against gray sky.
Its bare sprigs that will later carry green
and gold and tiny perfect cones
hang now like brown shawls finely knit.

Its white trunk and branches, bright
white in winter light, meander, lithe
and liquid in wind, never stiff like
conifers and oaks. Close up,

black hieroglyphs write themselves
into birch-bark history. Birch tree,
often solitary, growing its own way.

hans ostrom

Monday, October 21, 2019

Ginko Divestiture

That old ginko tree flung
its cache of currency at the wind
as if it had taken a vow
of ginko poverty. Here,
it said to Fall, have it all,
and tell Winter to choke
on it, like gall.


hans ostrom 2019

Thursday, December 20, 2018

Oblique

Pavement is silence
and rain is noise.
Air is a mystery
filled with solutions.
Trees are anguish;
factories, disappointment.
I've heard the music
that results from your playing.
It is less interesting than
you, and who can blame it?



hans ostrom 2018

Monday, November 6, 2017

every year another live show

black branch, red
leaves. brown leaves,
green branch. white
branch, gold leaves.
red/brown/gold/orange/
mottled leaves; brown branch.

and an array of variations,
deciduous improvisations.

and dancing down the street,
with ice-shoes on her feet,
comes the woman who
calls herself Winter.



hans ostrom 2017

Tuesday, January 17, 2017

In Old Palm Springs

In old Palm Springs, north, just beyond
the charming attempts at glamour,
trunks of big palm trees look like
elephants' legs: parched, dermatologically
checked, and weary.  The Earth
is each palm's shoe, and all the trees
are taking a walk through space.


hans ostrom 2017

Monday, November 19, 2012

Have It History's Way

Shaggy evergreens shrug and sway in a rainstorm.
Ezra Pound wasn't much for trees--Wordsworth-weary,
I suppose. Couldn't see history in or through them.
Instead he thought of rocks, layered, and of drills.
He was an American engineer. He wanted

comprehensive control of culture as if it were
acreage for the over-taking. Mineral rights.

But history's circulatory, and it's wet. It's
flexible, weird, and mysterious. Try to package
it, and you'll lose the magic. Impose upon
it, and it will flee like an Idaho mountain lion.

No, don't drill it, as if you were going
to set a charge, blast some ore.  Receive
it easy like a storm, shrug and sway and stay
surprised by it, and you will have its way with you.


Copyright 2012 Hans Ostrom

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Creature in a Copse

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Creature in a Copse

Scuffed rough gray trunks of fir trees
in a copse stand ruler-straight, may
suggest modest ambition or nothing
but the image they help compose.
"Yes, trees are everywhere," wrote
Pound, dismissively, the rest of the
argument left unstated. True, almost

no one can really take a nature-break
from civilization because in retreat
even a recluse thinks of civilization.
A lot. Still, the still copse is. How
these particular (not just any) boughs
play riffs on breeze matters if you
notice. No performance is identical.

Of course there's machinery, there are
people, more or less nearby. And there's
you, as envoi from the not-wild. To come
here, to look at a stand of conifers, always
intricate, proves a worth, re-establishes
a modest, appropriate dignity not
discoverable by drilling through rocks

from civilizations' virtual rubble of myths
and texts. A precocious smart-ass in a copse
is just another creature amid trees that
keep on with the being thing and breathe.


Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom