I was trying to think if there was some item that had been with me through all those moves to different locations. I do remember a pair of wool socks I must have hung on to for over 20 years, but finally they disintegrated. There's a pickled octopus and there are some baseball-cards; they've come with me on most, but not all, of the stops. The octopus has never been to Europe, nor have the cards.
Several poems, in one form or another, have accompanied me. I think I wrote the poem below over 25 years ago. I don't remember having published it, but I might have: one loses track. I've revised it numerous times. In any event, in handwritten, typed, "word-processed," or electronic form, it's traveled with me and in a sense lived with me. How odd. Or maybe not odd at all: Of course poets carry poems with them, and some of these poems are old inanimate friends, rather like a pair of socks. The poem:
January Twenty Eighth
Tonight I witnessed eight geese as they glided
over a city. They muttered like sleepers.
City lights faintly articulated
wide wings, gray undersides.
The true, ghost-like pattern of birds
seemed not to move in but with
darkness, traveling with the shadow of Earth,
towing daylight behind like gold fabric
toward a point of wintering.
Was the emblem of an unfrozen estuary
fixed in each bird’s mind,
a gem of foreknowledge burning like an ember?
Later, in the last hours before
somebody’s birthday,
I felt inhumanly old and longed
to comb sorrow from the air.
I thought of an old woman
holding up a hand mirror,
brushing shadows from her hair
out into rooms
of an enormous house at evening.
Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom
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