"The Superb Owl"

(super bowl)


What is this superb owl
that everyone's talking about?
It sounds fantastic. I would
like to watch it, to see it glide
in moonlight across
a clearing, alighting in a grove.

Well, yes, of course, we may hold
a superb owl press-conference
and attend superb owl parties!
I don't yet know what in particular
the superb owl even better
than other owls I've seen.
I will not quit until I find out.

In the meantime, let be known
that near barns and in woods,
in city parks and gullies,
on plains and in mountains,
I am a fan of the superb owl,
its perfect wingspan cutting
silently, like longing,
through the air.


hans ostrom
copyright 2015

"Exculpatory"

Not that you asked, but I like
the word exculpatory.
Its syllabation, to be more
or less precise.

The syllables make me think
of frogs croaking avidly,
singing exculpatory!
but never in unison,
for croaking is a kind of chaos,
free-form pond-jazz,
musical theater of
puffed-up slick lawyers
raising evidentiary objections to a judge:
the moon, which reflects a hidden law.

Syllables, a pond, the murky,
mucked up border between water
and land, frogs, moonlight--yes,
an excellent grouping
to host in my mammalian cranium
tonight as I scribble and scrawl
a way through
the dim light of my obscurity
to which I have been no not
syllabled but sentenced.


hans ostrom 2015

"Simon on the Bus"

Well, if the voices start,
Simon thinks, and they surge
and urge like sounds of a quarreling choir,
I'm gonna entertain 'em,
treat 'em as my cousins
at my hallucinated picnic,
which is as real as the rain
on the street out there.

Trying to lock them out
has worn me out, he thinks.
So does trying to select
a leading voice. That kind
of thing and thinking gets me kicked off
buses. Sometimes I feel

my mind my brain want,
oh want to produce an opera
all by themselves
without the help of
pill-wielding psychiatrists
who around me
seem to lose their sense of humor.
Oh I entertain them, it does
seem, though. They should be paying me,
at least my fare there; and back.



hans ostrom 2015

"Pandora Protests Just Enough"

Right--as if evil weren't in the world
already. You fucking gods are such liars:
okay, that isn't news. But
your lack of imagination?

"Yeah, we kept evil in a box,
but then we gave the box to this lady,
who went and opened it." That
is some weak shit.

So, look, either Prometheus
was evil for stealing your little
torch, or you are evil for torturing
him, or both. Ergo, evil pre-dates me.

It's your world. We just live in it.
The truth is the box was empty
until I started picking up beautiful
things and putting them inside.


hans ostrom 2015

"How You Represent Yourselves"

...And here they had thought all along
that what they must not try to represent
was God. No images of God!
they told each other in many
languages, from many faiths
and points of earthly view.

It turns out that God
(named differently by different
faiths) later told them
in a Godly language, Go ahead
and try to image me. I can
be God right in front of you
all day long, and night, and you'll
never no not ever image me
accurately.

And God added, for God can
and will add, I have seen
what you produce, all that crap,
and what bothers me is how
you represent yourselves.
Yourselves you do not represent
imaginatively. And you never
no not ever seem to weary
of killing each other,
mechanically, habitually,
routinely. Killing is
a representation, apparently,
of what and whom you aspire to me.

God suggested, You must ask
yourselves what is wrong
with you; ask continually.
Do not ask me. Represent yourselves
more imaginatively.


hans ostrom 2015
#BlackLivesMatter

"Judged"

To be seen
was to be judged.
To be heard
was to be judged.
To be silent
was to be judged--

judged for seeming
to withdraw from judging.
Thus silence seemed preferable.

To try to perform any task
was to be judged.
To prefer not to try
was to be judged and
to be forced
to try, then judged.

To conform was to be judged.
Not to conform, the same.

Every so often in this climate
thick with judgment, one
of the judges might throw
some praise your way, grudgingly,
as if it were a bone to a dog.

To read was to be judged but not
effectively, for they knew not what
exactly to judge you for, quite.

Thus reading became a pleasurable,
soft fortress. To write

was to have the written judged.
Worth the risk.

Just to be and to try to fill out
your personhood was to be judged.

They taught you how to judge
yourself: oppression, swallowed
and digested.

The energy they spent on judging
and you spent reacting to and evading
judgment: incalcuable; to be judged
a misappropriation.


hans ostrom 2015

"Every Flutist"

Every flutist
owns a cloud
and keeps it tethered
to a chair
with an invisible
strand of hair.

Every flutist
hides a whisper
in the basement
of a melody
and a sigh
in the cambrium
of a tree.

Every flutist
scribbles
a prescription
on the air
with a certain
enigmatic flair.


Hans Ostrom 2015

"Bookstore on Maui"

If you'd prefer to paw
through and gaze at used books
when you're on Maui, drive
or cycle past the smoke-stacks
of the sugar-plant between
cane-fields. On a wire

above a frail, dignified
wooden church, a night heron
in daylight may be studying
the water in the irrigation ditch.

Further on down the road,
in an old house belonging to
the Maui Friends of the Library,
you'll meet a modest, musty
buffet of books, 25 cents
a piece. Yes, there was a
church, without a steeple,
and here are the books.
Where are the people?

They're working, of course.
That sugar-factory, e.g.
Others are on beaches
and in bars, in shops and
cars. They're in the swelling,
lengthening anacondominiums,
eaters of capital, another
invasive species. And

people are also home in studio
apartments and tired bungalows,
recovering from double-shifts
in which, in some capacity,
they served touristic whims.

The books are on vacation,
away from the people. The shelves
are a residential hotel for words.
You stop by to say hello.


Hans Ostrom 2015

"Recent Storms"

The man in Maui said the recent storms
had ripped away sand and shortened beaches.
We were looking at one of the beaches.
It was narrow all right.

In what's called the distance, a humpback
whale lifted itself up, curved, went
back under, flipping its tail
in so doing: a thick, black Y.

Not incidentally at all,
a minah bird hopped onto grass
carrying a dead dragon fly.
The bird swallowed it,

taking the bulbous head first.
It stretched tall to get it all
down the pipe and expressed
liquid defecation in a quick

Latinate stream onto green.
We live inside a multitude
of dynamic systems, the man
said. He was homeless, and two

security-guards eyed him, us. That
we do, sir, I said. And
I gave him a fiver for his
journey, and everything changes form.


Hans Ostrom 2015

"Eagle Musings"

That eagle likes to sit on wood,
seize it with his bladed fists.
Rotting meat's preferable to him;
it takes less tearing, saves wear

on his old yellow beak. His
eyesight's fine. He likes to read
the waters and the fields,
great stories in which food moves.

When snow comes there's not much to do
but remember and, occasionally, shriek.


hans ostrom 2015

"His Locomotive"

His locomotive was powered by
SHAME-AND-LUST, LUST-AND-SHAME.
Yeah, his locomotive was powered by
SHAME-AND-LUST, LUST-AND-SHAME.
He hauled that erratic freight across
a mighty muddy plain.


hans ostrom 2015

Poet's Musings: Happy New Year From Emily and Elvis

Poet's Musings: Happy New Year From Emily and Elvis: Karl Shapiro published an essay called "The Career of the Poem." I haven't read it in ages, but I recall that, in part, it c...

from Auden's "New Year Letter"

A brief selection read aloud from W.H. Auden's long poem, "New Year Letter" (1940):

"White Fragility," by Robin DiAngelo

A link to an article about White insulation in the USA:

http://libjournal.uncg.edu/index.php/ijcp/article/view/249/116

"After Listening to Music From Duke Ellington's Orchestra"

A few frozen pleasantries to begin--
then some roots cultivated in reverse,
starting with tendrils down deep,
ending where taproot meets trunk-tree.
Posterity. What do you mean? I told you
I might call. I told you in the Fall!

All I had was a pair of deuces. (This is
one of those stories.) Next thing
nobody knows, I'm on top of a brass casino,
which I own, watching hawks glisten as
they glide. Now everyone's showing up,
all black limos and white surfboards;
and robodots and king snakes, the red
and the black. If music isn't from God,
it soon will be. And the filigree.

You just knew we had to get muddy
and moody, and Jesus Muhammad Moses
Mary and the Buddha-man: here come

visions of a visage, Ellington's,
carved in black and tan marble.
Time never stops playing,
so why should he?


hans ostrom 204

"Inside Your Poem"

Climb inside your poem. Cool as a cave
it is. Cool and luminous. Invisible
aromatic tapestries hang
from curved beams carved out of marble.
On the ceiling, images roll, shift, crash,
and recombine like the surface of surf.

Yes, and the lustrous bodies of dancers
in there--the music, the spring-water,
the food! In muted sectors elsewhere
in your poem, stone shelves carry books,
many of them full of poetry that, outside
your poem, has never been seen. Your
poem contains rare verse! Write

your way deep into cavernous
passages. Draw on the walls.
Listen and sing. Dream and tell.



hans ostrom 2014

"Of the Socks"

Someone's wearing the socks I almost bought.
I wonder how they're doing.

Does he, or someone, launder them well?
Have they been separated in the sock-drawer--
or bound to unfamiliar others?

Yes, of course, I totally agree
that it is lunacy

to dwell on items not purchased,
to conjure a rival. Honest, I promise
to ponder critical issues later.

Sometimes, you know, socks
are listed under "accessories."
Preposterous. I think

I will call the fellow now.
I'm calling him. He's answering

wearing only those socks.
It's disgusting. I characterize
him as a fool. Oh, yes,

I characterize freely. He demands
to know who I am. I hang up.

I'm wearing a business suit.
I feel authoritative in it.
Except I'm barefoot.



hans ostrom 2014

"Have You?"

"Have you," she asked, "done enough
to counteract severe effects of USA's
vicious racism?" Springing from reflex,

responses came to mind, including
more than enough, more than others,
stock words and phrases like they,
them, how long . . .; and a litany
of all the troubles he, personally,
had seen. And other ba-bah-blahs.

A striking thought then came to his mind.
Why not look at the evidence?
He did so.

Finally, he answered:
"Apparently not," he said.
"Welcome back to the struggle,"
she said. "Consistency is key. Go
light on excuses and rationalizations.
Listen as a good ally will. Inform
yourself. Get in shape."



hans ostrom 2014

"Fantasy in Purple," by Hans Ostrom

"The Long Haul," Hans Ostrom

Black truck hauling a white load.
Black train freighting a line of white boxcars.
Black barge moving heaps of beige garbage.
Black man holding up the weight of a white man killing him.

Getting on with it.
Carrying the carrying.
The white loads stay heavy, press down.
Inert weight, the freight is thought-free,
obtuse as iron and bereft of irony.

Where the black highway runs into blue water,
the black truck will dump its load at last
and roll lightly up the coast.

When the black train reaches the dusty depot,
it will wail like a monstrous saxophone,
then cut loose all those white cars, goodbye.

And after the black barge negotiates treachery
and sidles up to a wharf,
it will wait for a crane to take away
the accumulation
and then it will rise in the water.

Black notes behind bars
carry beat and tune
across white pages.

And the black notes, lifting from white charts,
shall swarm in air and, hitting white stones
hard and sweetly with the sound,
will turn them into beach sand.

White surrenders, exhausted from being White.
The White Queen and King had grown weary
of a polluted game. A humility blossoms
like an apple orchard. Milk is poured out
on black loamy soil. Comes the sound of weeping.



hans ostrom 2014