[version two]
The Old Man got body-tired of
and mind-bored with
labor about the same time.
Built his last rock wall at 70.
I thought of him today
when I was chopping at a vegetable
garden's frozen mud in January.
My mind let my body make my mind
think, "This shit is getting old."
How he would have phrased it.
I felt like I thought the sun
looks when it seems to drop
below the top of shadowed hills:
ready for bed. Of course there's more
work waiting under the horizon.
[second version]
(a tributary of the North Yuba River, Sierra County, California)
Before he'd heard anything about Switzerland, Schiller,
Rossini & stuff, he'd looked across the river from the house
at the long white beard of William Tell Falls. The sheer-drop
ravine looked perpendicular. No home for trout. Im-
pulsively, at 17, he decided to hike up there.
Headed out, crossed the river, climbed straight up,
more laddering than walking. Ravine was path in form
of bedrock. Manzanita brush walled the sides.
He got as far as the pool the falls slapped in jagged
pulses. Sounds of that constant collision careened
around the stone box. There was no climbing further.
In soaked jeans and wet boots, legs loaded up
with lactic acid, he slithered down like an arthritic
snake, satisfied to have spied on a geologic scene,
to have introduced himself to William Tell Ravine,
and to have witnessed water and rock in their own time.
A short Christmas Eve poem by the great Langston Hughes, reading and video:
(1938-2020)
Once
in Berkeley, smoke like Bay fog lay
over heads of cool-hip-jazz-club-clientele &
waitresses slivered through tables/bodies/chairs,
kept drinks coming, ice and glass and liquid held aloft &
Mr. Tyner
--he hit the mthrfckn keys
so hard one time strings
popped & whipped like snakes out
‘the belly of the grand dark
piano
& the percussionist had some
mojo stuff hanging from racks—
bones, steel tubes, feathers—
all
humid and scratchy and knock-talk
click-back bicker-bock-a-zone
sounds, & McCoy was rippin and roarin,
working the gift
out
of Keyborderland. And the horns. It was a big
marrow-filling, ear-enlightening night. Outside
after encores:
cool, misty Berkeley. Had a look around
to see which way the karma blew,
got in the ’67 Camaro, drove back up EYE-80
to plain brown-cow Davis, college town,
brain
humming like the lowest pianoforte
E-note pedaled through the measures.
A link to a fine poem by Kara B. Imle, "Winter Solstice," in the online journal medium:
(second version)
He was a traveling cat. He raced
and slunk, padded and trotted, sleek
and balanced, tendons full of
future speed. He moved soundlessly
but for a hiss or a yowl now
and then, or a crazy crash,
never his fault. Yes, a
questing cat, moving from this to
that, from at to at, detecting
motion, smooth as lotion, reading
air, decoding sounds from
everywhere. Itinerant and
cool, self-possessed and freely
feline--leonine, nined up with lives,
purring worries, cagey but uncaged,
guileless and wise. Green eyes.
2020
(second version)
"The ways of life are infinite and mysterious."- Georgio Scerbanenco, Traitors to All, translated by Howard Curtis
In spite of my playing, the piano
produced a simple minuet by Bartok,
which made me think of walking
cautiously across a frozen pond.
An empty coffee cup sat there
on the bookshelf. Cool ceramic.
Out there, and "up": night.
And stars, which we think of
as a permanent installation,
not a chaotic map of explosions
or freckles on an infinite face.
I dream recurrently about new
stars, close and bright,
flowing past in a sky-parade
as I look up from a meadow
in mountains and watch,
thrilled and terrified. I almost
forget to breathe. Someone I can't see
says, "Words are stars. I've
told you that before. Many times."
(second version)
A white, four-masted yacht slips between
dingy barges and trawlers, disappears into
a blue haze on the Sea of Marmara. The call
to prayer's an hour away. Swallows dive
and glide, pigeons prowl, the sun's
about to settle down.
Below the terrace, lush maples and oaks
sigh and sway, leaning west. Sounds of traffic,
children, and work never cease. Near a mosque's
minaret on the hill, a faded Turkish flag
flutters in slow motion. Now a seagull appears.
It glides in a wide arc, which now becomes
a large invisible circle. The glide traces
ever smaller concentric circles against
the backdrop of the sea until the gull
lands precisely at the point of a rooftop
below. The gull stands,
strong and ready, facing a low sun, and
something in the scene says all is well
this evening, even when it may not be,
especially if it may not be.
(second version)
(re-posting one from long ago)
1. Hide
2. Surprise your guests by dressing up as Santa Claws, the Beast from the South Pole.
3. Invite friends of many and no faiths and from across the political spectrum. Insist that they discuss only politics and religion. If the conversation lags, bring up the topic of sports teams.
4. Hold a seance and summon the spirits of dead-gifts-past: Soap on a Rope, the Gensu Slicer, 007 Perfume, Medieval Scholar Barbie.
5. Take any Martha Stewart recipe and add absinthe.
6. Spend an evening with your favorite nice-and-naughty person and insist that she or he be good, for goodness sake, if not excellent.
7. Host a small gathering of Philatelists, and have them display their holiday stamps from around the world.
8. Play "The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies" backwards and listen for secret messages.
9. Sponsor a cage-match between Frosty the Snowman and Jack Frost.
10. After the chestnuts have been roasted on an open fire in the street where you live, put on a bright red nose (and nothing else), dance ecstatically, listen for the festive sounds of sleigh bells, dreidels, and police sirens.
{according to our mailbox, it's definitely catalogue season}
I like to look at clothing catalogues
because photographed models
look so glad. "This sweater makes
me very happy," says a photo of a
man. "We're both wearing hopeful
skirts," says a snapshot of two women.
Some clothes appear without models
but seem animated: arms of shirts
and blouses assert themselves.
"We won't wait for bodies to take
us traveling," says the cloth. Noble
prose describes the products:
"Traditional cashmere in contemporary
styles. Imported." Retail catalogues
are a kind of comedy in which people
marry products in the end and prices
dance with prose. You see in a good
light what's for sale, gazing at
things you think might improve you.
hans ostrom 2011/2020
[a revised one from long ago]
A lake's a lovely dot
that should have ought
to have been if it weren't.
Lakeside, see the burnt
place inside stones:
campfire. The many zones
of any sort of lake
amaze: here fish wake,
there sleep. Shelves, shallows,
a glass surface where swallows,
evenings, select sweet bugs
to eat. Cool shade for slugs.
Shadows, where the muck
rules. A cove where a duck
feels safe and mutters.
Trees behave like shutters,
filtering light, allowing moss.
Humans can't help but toss
junk into lakes. I don't know why.
In the lake, see the sky.
Sit by the lake. My Lord, the sounds.
Even in small lakes life abounds,
from single-cell and bug to frog
to worms beneath a sunken log.
Fish jump, cruise, dive, and school.
Patient lakeside raccoons drool.
Kingfisher and eagle do espy,
and hawk with an awful eye
perceives a chipmunk by the lake.
(Back up that tree, for heaven's sake.
Made of snow or stream or spring,
a lovely, yes, a functional thing:
a blue acceptance, is a lake.
hans ostrom 2020
Reading/video of a short poem by the well known Irish poet and novelist (1904-1967). It's not about "the" gospel.
My great aunt, Bertha Åström, emigrated to the U.S. from Boden, Sweden (the far north) in the early 20th century. She had become pregnant out of wedlock when she was just 13-- statutory rape, at the very least. It was decided for her, I think, that she should emigrate and leave the child behind. Her eldest brother, Isak, my grandfather, had already come over, and he'd become a hard-rock gold miner, first at the Homestake Mine in the Dakotas, then in Colorado, and finally in Northern California--Grass Valley, Allegheny, and Sierra City. Bertha followed him for a while working as a cook and nanny, before settling in the Bay Area, where she became a nanny.
Eventually she married, and in the mid-1920s she and her husband built a resort in the Lakes Basin above Sierra City, specifically at Packer Lake. They and some laborers built a log-lodge and some log-cabins. Bertha cooked meals for the guests on a big wood stove. Many people of wealth liked to spend a week or two their in the summers, and they didn't mind roughing it a bit: it wasn't a Hilton.
By the way, her son Erik eventually made his way to America, and lived in Sierra City for the remainder of his life (and hers).
Before her life was totally disrupted, Bertha was training as a cook in a Boden hotel, and one of the recipes she brought over was for Swedish rye bread, which is quite different from Central European rye breads. It includes molasses, prunes, and anise seeds, and finely diced orange peels, mixed with dark rye flour, white flour, and a few mashed potatoes. My mother learned the recipe from Bertha and passed it along to other generations. It's a yeast bread which requires three risings, so it's an all-day task, pretty much. I adapted the recipe to a quick bread, and it captures the flavor and texture of the original pretty well. Sweet but not too sweet, aromatic, dense. Of course, there's nothing like yeast bread. The recipe:
Quick Swedish Rye Bread
This is a quick version of Bertha Åström’s
Swedish (Ostrom’s) yeast) rye bread. The consistency is slightly denser, but
the flavor is the same.
Ingredients:
2 cups white flour
2 cups dark rye flour
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup low-fat buttermilk [if you don't have buttermilk, add white vinegar to milk]
½ cup molasses
½ cup prune juice
2-3 tablespoons of grated orange peel
1 tablespoon dried anise seeds
Directions:
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
It’s best to sift the flour. Mix flour, salt, soda,
orange peel, and anise seeds well.
Mix prune juice and molasses and briefly warm the mixture
in a pan.
Add buttermilk and prune juice/molasses to the flour
(etc.) and mix. The dough will be quite sticky. Add more buttermilk if
necessary.
Briefly kneed the dough and shape it into a circular/oval
loaf on a floured surface. Cut an X into the top with a sharp knife.
Place on floured baking tin. Bake at 400 degrees for 30
minutes or slightly longer. Remove from oven and let loaf cool on rack.
Hans Ostrom 11/2019
[a revision of one I posted years ago]
The spreadsheet is all before you. The farther
left you travel, the more desirable things become.
Indeed the items named seem not just necessary
but inevitable, prophesied. As you travel toward
the reckoning right hand of calculation, acquisition
seems unlikely. You think of Zeno's Paradox.
You begin to feel an urge to save rubber-bands
and bits of string, to eat left-overs, sew
your own clothes, share your food with
people society discounts. When you finally arrive
in the severe, humorless zone of the numbers-column,
you then descend toward the hell of the Bottom Line,
which is, oddly enough, shown by two lines.
At that frontier, expenses devour entrails of income.
Accountants costumed in gray feathers perform
a ghastly arithmetical dance. You hear someone
mumble, "Nothing we can afford is worth doing,"
to which you respond, "Nothing worth doing
is quantifiable," which you don't believe.
You stand up and demand to know the origin
of money. You are forcibly subtracted
from the room. As you depart, you
hear someone say, "I think we just found
some extra money in the budget!"
A reading/video of a short poem by Seville-born poet Antonio Machado (1879-1939). Not sure who the translator is, but Machado's translator's include Willis Barnstone, Robert Bly, and Alan Trueblood.
Recorded this one a long time ago; in it, Auden thanks those who influenced his poetry:
Reading/video of a short poem by Mr. Wystan Hugh Auden in which he distinguishes between music and other arts. Poem is from his Collected Poems from Knopf.
We step off the Evolution Express
carrying a valise of neurons.
We are headed nowhere
and already there.
We live between our bones,
napping in hammocks of selfhood.
hans ostrom 1999/2020
Reading/video of a short poem by the famous British Romantic poet, Shelley, 1792-1822. Husband of Mary Shelley.
Reading/video of a short poem by the highly regarded Turkish poet Hikmet:
Reading/video of a short poem by the prolific Japanese poet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj80kqz4gr4
A fine poem by David Wagoner, widely acclaimed poet and former professor of creative writing at the University of Washington. Reading/video:
Short poem by Australian poet A.D. Hope, reading/video:
https://www.youtube.com/c/langstonify/videos?view_as=subscriber
Reading/video of short poem by Danez Smith, a poet from St. Paul. Smith's books include Homie and Don't Call Us Dead: check 'em out!
Reading/video of a short poem, #912, by Dickinson, and a happy [let us hope] voting day to you:
I had a long conversation with a magpie when I was about 5 years old. Very cordial. A reading/video of a poem by the acclaimed Australian poet Judith Wright:
Reading/video of a poem by Australian poet Kenneth Slessor (1901-1977):
Reading/video of a poem by the Victorian Anglican priest, progressive reformer, novelist, and poet Charles Kingsley. The poem is the source, or a source, of the old saying "every dog has its day."
A poem from African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, edited by Kevin Young (2020):
reading/video:
Reading/video of a short poem by Nazim Hikmet, poet and political prisoner in post-WWII Turkey.
Reading/video of a short poem by Walt Whitman--the poem is directed to James Buchanan, widely thought to be the worst president in American history:
Reading/video of a short poem by farmer, environmentalist, poet, and essayist Wendell Berry:
Reading/video of a short poem by Ellsworth McGlanahan "Shake" Keane (1927-1997), jazz trumpeter and poet from the island of St. Vincent:
Short poem by the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Brooks (1917-2000)--and a rare poem that begins with the word "But."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25Ew31iICl4
A little weary of your phone? Williams sympathizes. Video/reading:
Reading/video of a very short poem by Wendell Berry about walking in the woods. Berry, a farmer, has published widely acclaimed poetry, essays, and fiction.
Reading/video of a short poem by Miles (1911-1985), who was a remarkable poet and scholar--and a remarkable person. In childhood she was afflicted with severe arthritis, and as an adult she had highly limited use of her hands, legs, and feet. I saw her read at the University of California, Davis, and an assistant carried her into the room. The reading was great. She graduated from high school in Los Angeles--John Cage was a classmate. She earned a B.A. in English at UCLA and a Ph.D. at Berkeley, where she taught her whole career. She pioneered quantitative research in the humanities, and using a punch-card computer, published a concordance to the poetry of John Dryden. Her own poetry garnered her much acclaim. She was an early supporter of Beat poetry and helped Alan Ginsberg get Howl published. She was especially interested in different modes of diction in modern poetry.
link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd-JZHpF7pc
Short Rilke poem translated by Edward Snow, from the Uncollected Poems of Rilke's.
Reading/video:
Books you don't finish reading
are like mountains you don't
finish climbing or comparisons
like this that don't seem quite right.
They are like acquaintances who
don't become friends. (This seems
better.) You have been told or
think you see what's up ahead,
but a weariness sets in. Let
the book be great for others,
you think. Just leave me out of it.
I've resigned from the reading of
The Fairie Queen, Clarissa, The
Castle of Crossed Destinies,
The Charterhouse at Parma,
countless portly mystery novels.
I pretended to finish Paradise
Lost but, as with the film,
The Titanic, I had guessed the ending.
I forced myself to climb Mann's
Magic Mountain. It took
decades, and it wasn't worth it.
When Sam Johnson (who
said of Paradise Lost, "No one
wished it longer") got tired
of a book, he threw it across
the room. Bolder than I,
he didn't resign from reading.
He fired the book.
hans ostrom 2017
Reading/video of a poem by French Symbolist and so-called Decadent, Paul Verlaine (1844-1896)--translated by Richard Greene:
One of the better known poems by Tagore (1861-1941), poet, composer, philosopher, fiction writer, artist--astoundingly talented. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913.
Reading/video:
Reading/video of a short poem that, in a flash, presents a theory of creativity. Luis Cernuda was a Spanish poet who spent much of his life in exile from Franco's regime.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Lsiw5zTWf8
Reading/video of a poem by Neruda, translated by W.S. Merwin:
Video/reading of a poem by Emily Dickinson--number 407 or 670, depending upon the numbering system.
Just in time for Halloween, a poem by British poet Elizabeth Jennings, "Ghosts," video/reading:
Reading/video of a short poem by the great Russian writer. The poem was translated by Babette Deutsch, American writer, critic, poet, and translator.
Reading/video of a four-line poem (I think we call that a quatrain) by Robert Frost:
Reading/video of a short poem by Milosz, the Nobel Prize winning Polish poet:
A poem by Swedish Modernist poet Karin Boye (1900-1941), translated by David McDuff, who translated her Collected Poems from Bloodaxe Books. Reading/video:
Libraries seem more important than ever in these anti-intellectual, anti-science times. Here's a short tribute-poem to them by Philip Larkin--reading/video:
A short poem by Beat writer Lew Welch. Welch (1926-1971) was an important poet and teacher in the San Francisco Renaissance/Beat Movement. For a time, he functioned as the step-father of the lad who would adopt the performer's name, Huey Lewis. Welch is presumed to have committed suicide on May 26, 1971, in the Sierra Nevada. His body has never been found. City Lights Books published his Collected Poems (Ring of Bone) in 2012, with an afterword by Gary Snyder, who was Welch's roommate at Reed College. Reading/video:
A reading/video of a poem by Conrad Aiken, American poet who won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award:
Harlem Renaissance writer Gwendolyn Bennett wrote this poem about the great adventure-novelist Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, etc.), whose father was French and whose mother was African--and a former slave:
(in other words, it stinks)
