Two-Faced Time

Time, the vicious versatile thug:

pickpocket, shoplifter, burglar,

armed robber, assassin, dictator . . . .

Why can't Time get a real job

like the rest of us?

Time, robust provider:

opener of space for life.

Enabler of Evolution. 

Angel of music. Parent

of our necessary illusions.

Kind casino boss, who gives us

good chances to win 

encounters with the Mystery

that may be God.

hans ostrom 2024

They Teach Us to Adapt to Them

Crows, those shadow-shouters,

seem to live in towns amongst thick trees.
Out of their twig-walled cottages,
here they come, gliding, flapping,
bouncing, yelling. They're quiet

during almost all their hours,
but their noise makes you forget
that--like a ratchet-voiced hermit
who bickers with imaginary
invaders, scaring hikers. Crows

maneuver us into adapting to them.
So many creatures do. Given
the billions of us, they all have to.

hans ostrom 2023

Nostalgia and Evolution

I wonder why Evolution
selected nostalgia as a trait
worth packing in perpetuation's
luggage. Maybe it's useful
to have people around who know
how things used to be done
(and never stop talking about them).

Sentimental yearning may lower
blood pressure. Or maybe those
who survive because of other
factors live long enough to have
a past to miss, so that nostalgia
just hitches a ride--which is something
people used to do all the time.
In fact, I remember . . . .


hans ostrom 2020

A Circus in Germany

A small Roma circus drags Evolution
to Bretzenheim, tacks up posters,
circles battered vans and trailers,
lets animals and children out to stretch.

A llama and two camels with flaccid humps
stand beneath a canopy, munching nothing,
about them the air of wisdom and dung.

A child rides a hippopotamus onto grass.
She looks like a wart on a planet.
The hippo becomes a gray boulder
upholstered in leather. Its teeth are
as big as my fist, its legs as long
as my fingers. How many million
years ago was it a slender fish?

Villagers cut through the park
to peer at the bestiary. a stinking
goat, smirking camels, and stunted
ponies. Children under the tiny
plastic Big Top can be heard
to scream with glee. In there
creatures and people jump through hoops.

hans ostrom
1981/20019

Creature Brains

Creature brains feature
lanes nature grooved
as species moved into
spaces over time with
their accidental
                adaptations.




Hans Ostrom 2017

Concerning Me and a Concept Called You

Like you I was in space today,
moving around on what some call
Earth.  The Chinese in Mandarin
call it tu, with a diacritic mark
over the u, a parenthesis lying
on its back, looking up at the sky.

Evolution means the weather
can seem calibrated perfectly
to me (and you) and me (and you)
to the weather.  A peace treaty
signed by molecules. Can be
revoked at any time.

After work, I returned
to the circumstance by which
regardless of how much humans
learn, certain fundamental
mysteries will not yield,
such as what's the all about?--
this moving around on a
matter-ball that spins and tilts
and orbits and has an indigestive core
of molten stuff.



hans ostrom 

Dragonfly Corpse Recovery

A blueberry's what
the head of the dead dragonfly
looked like.

A blueberry with a small
metallic visor attached.  Do you
covet video
of what was perceived and how
through that mono-goggle? Me, too.

The body looked like one of two
elegant eyebrow
from under which a Persian woman
looks wisely
upon the world. And the wings?
Stained glass

done in ash-gray, or crystal
camouflage
for hiding in fog. When the head
fell off
and fell into a paper cup,
it sounded like a final pebble
hitting a coffin.

The legs were a bunching of
collapsed angles,
the knees so terribly delicate.

Things fall apart.  Creatures, too.
But it's also true
that this dragonfly was one of those
beings that show

how Evolution's patience delivers
functional art
and inspired form to its client,
the unsentimental Earth.



hans ostrom 2017

Bold Talk

Bold Talk



Bold talk is the best kind. It
may be why talk came to mind.
Once fitted with it, talk I mean,
we could just sit and make stuff
up, say dark is sun, sky is heaven,
lie like the skin of a chameleon--
a way to feel safer, blend in when
we seemed to ourselves to be
different from all other creatures.

Bold talk remains one of the main
features of fear, confusion, despair.
There is no end to these, and no end
to talking boldly, which represents
much but not boldness. Incrementally
grows the force of talk in all its
forms, the Earth now wrapped in
electrons saturated with our telling
and our selling: endless
effluvium of conversation.


Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

Seeding

I'm almost two seasons off with this poem, as it chiefly concerns the seeds and seeding of Fall. However, one could argue, if one were making excuses, that Fall's payoff is about to occur. All those seeds, etc., have been biding their time, waiting for the Earth, Sun, and even the Moon to do their gravitational dance and bring on just enough sunlight, warmth, and moisture. I also allude to Darwin indirectly by mentioning Evolution, and (as I'm sure you know) it's the 150th birthday of Chuck's Origin of Species, which I read in a graduate course that was dedicated to the year 1859 in England. We red a Dickens novel and an Eliot one and lots of poetry (including Meredith's Modern Love) and essays. My particular task was to "follow" the London Times month by month in 1859--on microfilm. Oy.

The course was taught by the late Elliot Gilbert, Kipling specialist (oddly enough) but also one of the first academics to take detective literature seriously. He published a nice anthology with critical commentary with Bowling Green State University. . . .

I also mention God in the poem. I didn't ever see a particular conflict between God and Evolution, but I'm probably missing something, as usual.


Seeding


Out of the orange smoke
of California poppies materialize
thin sage-green scrolls, in which
tiny prophecies of next year's
poppies harden, darken. Lupine-
pods go black-grey, too. They bulge
and stiffen, bags of loot. Dill
supports its canopy of seeds with
spindly architecture. Hollow-boned
sparrows perch on these green, frail
stalks, gorge. They will defecate
seeds later, encasing them in
hot, effective nitrogen, part of
a plan Evolution stumbled on
way back when When didn't
exist yet. Earth backs off a bit
from Sun, tells a hemisphere
of vegetation to go to seed. A
deluge of cones, pods, hips, sacs,
fronds, and fruits surges across
one terrestrial moment in space,
predicting vegetation's recurrence
and able to deliver the goods, already
outlasting Winter yet to come.
Seeding is a vast, well organized,
ordinary miracle. Seeding is God
at God's most professional. It is a
counter-apocalypse of indetermination.
Fall concerns ferocious patience
and thinks several moves ahead.


first published in Sierra Journal 2006, Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Mirth

I got to know the work of G.K. Chesterton first through his Father Brown detective stories and then through his fantastical thriller, The Man Who Was Thursday. Then I started reading his writing on religion, including Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. Chesterton's an extremely witty, agile writer, although in nonfiction he may rely excessively on the paradoxical flip, as in the following quotation:

Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists." - The Uses of Diversity, 1921

The sentence is smart and witty. Sentences of this kind seem ubiquitous in the books, however, so sometimes one yearns for another mode of rhetoric.

You might not guess as much by considering this photo (above) of G.K., but he was a mirthful (albeit single-minded) defender of mirth. In fact, he claimed mirth was one of the benefits of being Christian, a faith he relentlessly defended, partly through a running argument--in print and on the radio--with G.B. Shaw, famed atheist. At the same time, Chesterton was most interested in egalitarian economics and some forms of socialism, but of course not the forms that dismissed religion. He was in favor of distributing wealth, in other words, and probably would have (and did?) mock the idea of "redistributing" wealth. He may have argued for distributing wealth first and then worrying about "redistribution" later, as the quotation above may suggest.

Based on my imperfect understanding of Chesterton's work, I assume he would attribute the existence of mirth to God's having given it to humans. I'm willing to entertain that possibility, but I think it's also entertaining to ponder whether mirth is something that evolved, along with opposable thumbs, for example. Cats and dogs certainly play, but do they experience mirth? Do primates? (I know: "define mirth.") How much does the human brain have to develop before it generates a sense of mirth, triggers a laugh? No doubt Chesterton would mercilessly and mirthfully skewer my desire to understand mirth through the lens of evolution. In any event, I couldn't help thinking of Chesterton as one reader over my shoulder when I drafted the following poem.

The Birth of Mirth

I don't know how many cells a creature
must possess until it develops a sense
of play as distinguished from or in concert
with function. (My knowledge of science
is a source of mirth to scientists I know.)
Regarding mammals, more particularly
humans, I've deduced with my Left Brain
that at some dim prehistoric parliamentary
meeting of variables, babies started laughing
soon after birth if not before. At that
unfalsifiable point, the mythical door
of mirth opened. What a nice selection.
How funny. Perhaps, like me,

you've laughed at babies who laughed
unprompted, and you felt the quirky purity
of mirth. Maybe sometimes you just want
to go out or stay in and have
a few laughs. Anyway, it's all traceable
(this is a lie) back to the birth of mirth.
How is humor? Why is funny? Mirth must
be. This much we know, or this little.


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Molecular Sonnet for Sunday

Whether you take some kind of Creationist point of view or some kind of Evolutionary one--or are skeptical of both, as a friend of mine is--it's nonetheless amazing that mere matter, of which we are composed, can have concepts and produce complicated emotions. If we ask how in the heck single-cell organisms evolved into organisms complex enough to think of love, time-share condos, philosophy, chess, and combustion-engines, the Creationist point of few is certainly easier to grasp: God made it so. The Evolutionary point of view, ironically, seems more miraculous. What are the odds that organism A would have eventually evolved into organism Z--a human? A key variable, I think, is time. The Biblical calendar is pretty brief. The Evolutionary one allows for millions and millions of years during which lots of accidents and false starts can happen--eventually leading to organisms called human golfing, cheating on taxes, and singing ballads in cafes. The Evolutionist's retort to God made it so seems, in part, to be Evolution takes its own sweet time, of which there is an infinite amount.

As may be immediately apparent, I did not take millions of years to write the following sonnet, which has something to do with molecules and love.

Molecular Mood: A Sonnet

Molecular in nature were the two,
For they were human, and therefore made
Of carbon, protein, fat--the usual stew
Of which stuff in this matter, fact, is said
By scientists to be composed. But how
Does one molecular composite reach
The point at which it loves, the point called Now
Wherein one body-mind, by means of speech,
Decides and then declares this thing called Love,
A concept generated by uncounted other
Molecular composites, the stuff of
Which Civilization's made? Whatever.
The she loves him; the he loves her. Their cells
Conspire to cast reciprocating spells.

Hans Ostrom/Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

I'm inordinately fond of the made/said partial rhyme in the first quatrain, and of the partial rhyming of other/Whatever. The couplet pleases me, for some reason.