Winter Work

I got used to working most Decembers.
Shoveling snow. Washing pots.
Pounding nails as a carpenter's laborer
between semesters. Once we framed a house,
in sparkling sub-zero weather, High Sierra.
It was oddly exhilarating, though after one shift
I slept so deeply before supper, I
woke up stupefied thinking it was morning.

Then came decades of reading
final essays written by exhausted
college students. Ritual academic
labor, not hard work but grinding still.

This year I'll stumble around
in garden beds, grabbing dead
soggy stalks and seizing final
weeds. Not labor but gesture
of toil, enough to pump cold,
rinsed air into old lungs
and get me feeling sympathetic
to all the people who have
to work shit jobs in the cold
just to get by.


hans ostrom 2018

Loyalty and Sincere Is Me: A Spam Poem

(found poem)

i'm Rose a
single lady positive thinking,
good heart and kindness,
easy going and playful
person, Honest,
loyalty and sincere is Me,
I hate lie and cheat, looking
for nice person for
friendship Take
care Rose.


hans ostrom 2018

Spring in November

November day, Pacific Northwest--
and Spring came back. It sobbed
thunderstorms, slammed sunlight
into steel clouds, lobbed lightning,
and lit up the sky at dusk like Magritte.

From dark roadways and dim ground,
we may have smiled. Hard to tell
in the Age of the Grimace. Anyway,
Spring knocked a lamp over as it stumbled
back into seasonal order. Across
a muddy field, December
stared like a weary wolf.


hans ostrom 2018

The Rack of Seasons

What a rack of seasons
that was. In January
I fell backward into snow
and was almost buried. Noise
left the world. Someone
pulled me up and tossed
me into Summer, where I
heard a rattlesnake,
broke boulders with
a sledgehammer for minimal
wage, and drank cheap wine,

which tipped me over onto
Spring, where I caught a cold,
grew anxious, and hoarded
books, which opened up
into October, where I stacked
the last haul of firewood--
dry oak from dead trees.
Acorns pebbled the ground
and the North Wind
began to say No.



hans ostrom 2018

Music of Our Days

Behind the high green
muscular hedge (laurel),
a tall black Doberman
holds his howl mournfully.

He hears the red sound
of sirens. It hurts and disturbs
him. Self-soothing, he howls
again but at the end

of this extended note, he
moves the moan up
a half-note. The sound
is unexpected, artistic.

He is called Caesar, this
tall sad dog. Praise him.


hans ostrom 2018