Escapes

An elephant escaped

the Point Defiance Zoo

and strode the streets

of Tacoma briskly, briefly,

as if going to work.

At a summer party

my parents threw, outside

in the High Sierra, the ever-

silent plumber, Otto,

sipped whiskey. He

saw a horse come up 

to the pasture fence.

Otto climbed the fence

& leapt on the horse, 

which galloped and tossed

him off. Otto got up,

came back, climbed over,

and sipped more whiskey.

First time

her husband struck her,

she loaded the two kids

and some luggage 

in the Chevrolet and drove

away, {No more of that shit,}

she said to her friend.

The old woman 

who had fought cancer

for five years lay

in a hospice bed,

comatose--but suddenly

woke--tried to get up

and run away. One last

attempt before

entering the light. 

hans ostrom 2024

Overnight at Haypress Creek

We hiked into the deep ravine

of a quick, cold creek, High Sierra.
Found a place to camp and caught
a couple trout to eat. Evening:

lit a small fire to cook the fish
and heat some beans. Ate, then
doused the fire and slipped
into sleeping bags. Night:

wilderness became immense,
swallowed any sense of self-importance.
A world of creatures came alive,
bears and bobcats and bats,
deer, raccoon, rodents, and night-bugs.

Stirring in the brush, snapped sticks,
owl-hoots and the haunting yips
of coyotes coming through the canyon.
Walls of tall conifers turned black,
their furred edges outlined against
a star-choked sky, where meteors
scratched glow-trails close and far away.

Fatigue smothered awe. We slept....
Woke to a rotated sky and a risen moon
bearing down on us like one mad headlight
from a nightmare. Cricket choruses,
unceasing. Freshest air filling lungs.
And the creek: talking, talking, telling
tales of time we could never comprehend.

hans ostrom 2022

Forest Floor

forested canyon, sierra

nevada--we walked

among conifer columns

standing in living lithe

patience. our booted feet

landed quietly on annual

layers of pine needles,

each level a different color

of time, light tan on top,

and a darkening all the way

down to black fusion 

with soil, reabsorption--

perhaps a resurrection 

with water up, back up into

tree through root and cambrium,

bough, cone, seed, pollen--

or needle again, shaking

green in wind, staying

still in snow. 

hans ostrom 2021

Scene Blue and Green

The scene is blue and green.
Blue like shadow indigo.
Green like pine and fir tree
boughs. Blue and green cover

tall roughly rounded mountains,
ravines between. Air
is almost too fresh to be
other than cherished. The day

is cold and gray. You are cold,
not gray. You see a mist-fog
rise from a quick narrow river
into mountains and ravines,
into green and blue. You think,

the scene is not officially
beautiful, commodity pretty,
but to you superb. You feel

the scene insinuating sadness,
wielding power. Grief
and irrevocable loneliness
seem involved. You
want to go in and get warm
but not enough to leave
the scene of seeing blue and green.


hans ostrom 2020

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

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

Pick and Shovel

Dig with a shovel, dig with a pen:
Heaney's formulation. This

morning I dug a shallow trench,
recalled my Old Man, Alec,
who taught me how to use a pick
and shovel right. The crucial
nuances. (I've never seen

a Hollywood movie in which
the digging and digger weren't
unintentionally ludicrous. Usually it
starts with the genre of shovel itself.)

Alec had dug everything from
blasted quartz gold ore to river
gravel mixing concrete, from
sewer-lines to stone-wall footings.
Also graves. Often he used a long steel bar
to make a boulder twice his
weight dance aside. In another

life, without a war, he would have
been a mining engineer or geologist.
He appreciated High Sierra rock
and soil. He never got frustrated
with them. Instead he stayed steady,
befriended leverage, let the tools
work. Piles of rock, piles
of dirt.  Soon the task melted.

Labor isn't poetry, but it has
a rhythm, rides repetition,
requires alert attention. By

the time finished the trench
today, old jeans and a paint-stained
shirt had siphoned pools of sweat,
and I as satisfied again with
the father I had had.


hans ostrom 2018

Lichen, Sierra Nevada

pale green lichen
on blue rocks, top of mountain.
a patient form of life.


Hans Ostrom

Allegory at Alpine Elevation

You're standing outside in the dark.
In the mountains, alpine elevation.
The cold wind's blowing hard enough
to keep the crust on the snow,
and to blur your vision, so the stars
seem momentarily to reel.

You say a word, any word,
to yourself but out loud. Wind
takes it from your mouth so fast
the word never gets fully formed.
All evidence of your having
spoken vanishes. You recognize

what has happened as the briefest
allegory about ego's status
in the flow of matter. You go
back inside. You're glad for the
warmth. Still the light and things
inside seem trivial and doomed.
You feel embarrassed for them.



hans ostrom 2017

A Quality of Cold in September

Cold no longer subtle,
as the shifts started in September
as we finished framing a house.
Hurry, get the roof on.

Cold now in September
as I clear the garden beds,
knocking loose a few last
golden potatoes and carrots
with sunburned indigo shoulders.

It's an insistent chill.  An overture
to a Winter suite. An advance-team
working for an immanent season
that bides its clime in gravitational
patterns.  A shirt under

a flannel work-shirt--then and now--
soaks up sweat & cold startles
the skin when wind rouses itself.
This is a ritual annoyance
that flavors wistful weariness
when I pick up a rake or a shovel.


hans ostrom 2017

William Tell Ravine

(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 seemed perpendicular.  No home for trout.  Im-

pulsively, as usual, he decided to hike up there when he was
17. He headed out, crossed the river, climbed straight up,
more laddering than walking. Ravine was path as rock
and manzanita brush walled the sides. He made it

as far as the flat pool the falls slapped in a-rhythmic
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 seen water and rock in their own time.


hans ostrom 2017

Dilapidated

The syllables of this word seem
about to come undone.  Anyway,
dilapidated is best if you don't
have to live in it.  Sauntering
around the Sierra Nevada,
I liked seeing shacks that
had stopped lying to themselves.
They spoke highly of the failed,
exhausted miners who'd lived
in them. Weirder were

the cars that people had driven
or pushed into the manzanita brush.
Rust munches them even now.
Yes, and the quiet old imbibers
sitting at the Buckhorn bar,
weary feet in weary shoes
touching brass. These old folks
sipped from a shot glass; and waited.
And today I feel dilapidated.



hans ostrom 2017

A Graveyard in the Sierra

The one graveyard I will know.
The light of dreams and fierce shadows of nightmares
that passed through the nights of these minds: I think
of that one river I’ll know, the North Yuba, of water-logged leaves
turning over and shifting in the shadows of stones--
for one instant sharply seen through current’s surface.

Always the North Yuba River
that made this canyon, but only for a time: our minds.

We built a wall one August
at the bottom of the hill that is this graveyard.
My father had hurt his foot two weeks before.
Now he limped and smoldered,
griped with deep bruising and having to favor it.
I watched my step.

Heaped in dry dirt,
granite seemed desperate for a mortar-line,
a map of its riving. One night I dreamed
the mortar-line was a foot wide in places;
granite and quartz went to powder like dried mud,
and old men from Sierra City asked, What went wrong?
What have you done?

In that dream, the crumbling, un-crafted wall
was order I’d failed to bring. Now the North Wind
in my dream was free to scream.

In summer, swallows in the evening
circle over a pond in a pasture, dive and dip for insects,
missing, missing, curving up again, turning,
diving. The mind
in an evening of awareness,
curving out over its topography,
desires to recognize a history;
it dreams of a sudden pattern
on the surface of a pond like the face
of Christ Christians dream of.
We give ourselves over to order in daylight
only to have light of dreams
and fierce shadows of nightmares
pass through our sleeping minds
like scraping leaves--
the chaotic heart
pounding in a dark bedroom, frightened
by an old men’s questions.

The county is running out of land for graves.
It has ten thousand acres of timberland,
but the Dead are not a major voting bloc.
So my father thought of leaving niches
in the wall for urns. And when any of the old boys
(at most ten years from being sealed up in the wall
themselves) would wander up the hill to check our progress,
he'd tell them we were putting "ash-holes" in
and laugh harder than they would
and wink at me, reaching in his shirt pocket
for a can of snoose.
I'd nail together box-like forms
of plywood, wrap them in plastic, and grease them
so we could remove them easily later on.
My father built the wall around them,
creating what I thought of then as small formal caves,
like the cliff houses of the Anasazi.

Mixing mortar, sometimes I thought of all the caskets
crowded underground not ten feet from me
and thought, "What the hell am I working for?"
Or it would be just god-awful hot,
and I'd forget about the caskets and think,
"What the hell am I working for?" For money, of course.

Winter. The wall is long since finished, now snowed on.
His foot, healed. We drive up to the graveyard
one Saturday to bolt a brass American Legion plaque
over one of niches.
A typewritten note taped to the Post Office glass
says the ashes of the former storekeeper will be interred
next week in a brief ceremony. The “o” of these words
is gray at the center from worn type.
We unbolt the wooden cover:

A scorpion dances stiffly on the floor
of his cold cave, is curved up viciously,
a smoldering summer image in the mouth of winter.
He shuffles sideways in darkness,
funny and dangerous like a Vaudevillian psychopath.
We bolt the plaque to cold granite.
Snowflakes lodge in the hair on our hands.
We both think of the scorpion
locked in the wall of our making:

"That'll fix the son-of-a-bitch," my father says.
The old fireman who lives across the road
has left for the winter, the windows
of his white house shuttered.

In the hills, coyotes gnaw deer carcasses.
A howl of absence issues from snowed-over meadows,
from carcasses and mine tunnels in the hills,
from the canyon of the North Yuba.

We drive down the slushy road
that was white-hot in August
through Sierra City, empty in Winter,
and head out along Highway 49 toward the house;
we don't think not so much of the dead or the marvelous un-interred light
of their unrecorded dreams, but rather of black-iced asphalt
and of a red scorpion we sealed up in our wall
with childish delight.

Hans Ostrom 1980/2014

Red Polka-Dot Dress

[re-posting this one from another blog, Red Tales]


There is a photograph of his mother wearing a dress with red polka-dots on a white background. The photograph is a color print from the negative film of a snapshot taken after the mid-point of the 20th century.

This is the most famous dress his mother owned, as things turned out. He thinks about her putting it on that day to get ready for the party, a summer-party in the High Sierra. He thinks of her thinking that the party will be a good time, an open field of behavior, an earned respite from the work of raising three children and tending one husband in rugged country 4,500 feet above sea level.

The son knows she doesn't, on that day, see the dress as a symbol in so many words or thoughts. But he imagines she looks at herself in the circular mirror of the "waterfall" bureau, imagines she sees the dress contrasting with her deep summer tan and blue eyes just so. The image she sees is attractive, and it satisfies her. The party is going to happen. She and her husband are hosting the party. The husband is not an easy husband to have. His personality is as hard and well defined as a sheer stone bluff in the Sierra. He is a rugged, overwhelming man, with a grudge against life that's masked by a child's sense of mirth, a prophet's sense of will, a peasant's capacity to toil, and a glad smile as broad as a highway-billboard. Luckily, liquor makes him gladder still. The son knows the mother knew of other women's husbands whom liquor made mean, made violent.

At the party, there will be work but also other women to do the work, so the work will seem like part of the party. There will be laughter, liquor, and food--and several compliments about the dress, which seems that day to be the perfect summer-dress, sleeveless, cotton, red polka-dots on a white background. Everyone at the party will know a great deal about World War II, hard work, the Great Depression, and the English language as spoken colloquially in the United States of America.

None of it will escape the avalanche of time, although snapshots, saving the dress, and nonfiction writing are amusing tactics of delay, the poignant motions of an amateur magician's hands, with Death sitting in the audience like the bald figure in Bergman's The Seventh Seal.

Thank God, he thinks, his mother didn't come close to thinking thoughts as melodramatic as "none of it will escape the avalanche of time," etc., that day. Thank God his mother never saw The Seventh Seal and asked him questions about the film. He would have tried to answer the questions, and his mother would have remained unconvinced by the answers. She would have disliked the film as much as she disliked puppets of any kind.

The white dress with red polka-dots fit, the alpine sun shone, friends and acquaintances arrived, and everyone acted as if they weren't about to die, and when people act that way, and they should, they seem untroubled and, indeed, immortal.

By his accounting, all the adults who attended that party are dead. The polka-dotted dress hangs in the closet of a daughter-in-law, and one of the cousins, the many cousins, painted a watercolor featuring the dress hanging on a clothesline. The dress is a cut and stitched quaint decorated piece of cloth. The snapshot lies between pages on a shelf somewhere.

Everything is taking place and changing at a speed humans cannot, do not, and best not comprehend fully. In a way, the party was over before his mother ever put on the dress, but she didn't see it that way, and that day, that's part of what mattered, he thinks.

The scandal of time is that it allows humans just enough time to arrange their thoughts and manage their habits so as to avoid confronting the scandal of time every moment. Scandalously, time makes routine seem reasonable and a bright dress permanent, and it makes summer-parties seem like a fair exchange.

Strong Views

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Strong Views

On the narrow road rising steeply
to Sierra City's cemetery, a wry
sign notes, "Not A Through Street."
We set the headstone of a dead aunt
next to a rock wall her brother
built. We place beneath the concrete

a full bottle of whiskey, a
horseshoe, a deer antler, and
a piece of rose quartz. Otherwise,
the aunt's not represented here
except in our memories. Her
ashes travel up by an alpine
lake somewhere. The family's
idiosyncratic, you might say,

and tardy, even haphazard, with
its burial rituals. In fact, there
are no rituals, no funerals or
formalities. People get together
eventually, share some laughs
and glum grief, eat, and drink.

A panting black dog lies
in the truck watching us lay
the headstone. Later, the aunt's
remaining brothers will visit
the stone in the shade, have
a look, say a total of, oh,
seven words, maybe. For now,

we kid around in the cemetery,
get the job done, nobody's
business but our own. Goodbye
to Aunt Nevada. The smooth blue
stone, saved from an arastra,
gives the pertinent dates, her
other last name, and a nickname--
then mentions, "Strong Views."


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Horse-Trail, High Sierra

Horse-Trail, High Sierra


Riding horses in the High Sierra, we take
trails threaded through hulking conifers,
bypass a Maidu/Washo ceremonial hill
covered with black gravel. Breezes off
Gold Lake wrangle scents of wildflowers,
thick aroma of skunk-cabbage, corn-lily,
and mountain misery. The horses snort
thin air. There's sign of bear.

Lightning felled a tree not long ago.
Now new thunder-clouds amass explosive,
creamy ambition over blue distant peaks,
east. Alpine meadows seem closer to
Paradise than most places, at least
in this easy summer's ride. The

sun-scalded cowgirl from Portola
leading the way shifts on the saddle
and hollers unsentimentally, "This
tree you're passing's over 300 years old."


Copyright 2009

Bear Nearby

Bear Nearby

Tonight a bear's at the perimeter,
beyond where cabin-lights dissolve.
The animal breaks brush and gulps air,
snorts, working hard, and we hear this.
We glance up at Ursa Major above
the Sierra Buttes, a risen massif.

We figure the bear's breaking down
an apple tree now and gorging--wild
and deliberate, focused and irascible.
We don't walk closer. The bear doesn't
advance. There's a distance to be kept.

There's a fascination in the dark,
which entertains a big invisible mammal
whose family's lived here since before
any human named constellations or
eavesdropped on night's business.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Summer Carpentry

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Summer Carpentry

Sometimes when Sierra sun baked
and bleached a new house's skeleton,
I'd stand on a plywood sub-floor, jeans
sweat-drenched, forearm fatigued from
hammering all day, and look up at
an immobile mountain greened with
manzanita, fir, oak, and pine, and know
something secretly but not sadly.

We'd built that thing, frame of dwelling.
Wages came, sun lavished light, mountains
mimed illusion of permanence. Everything,
everything changes always and everywhere.
This isn't news but you can come to it
newly after a long's days work with wood.

And the Old Man said, "Hans, time to pick
up the tools," and it was 4:00 p.m. that one
day once in all of time, and somebody wanted
a house by the river. A canyon-breeze caught
sweet odor of sawdust. I stopped staring,
came back to tasks, reached for a saw,
a plumb-bob, a level; moved in and with the
changes. Newly nailed partitions cast shadows.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Exuberant Palomino

(image: a palomino, not the one in question, alas)









Study: Exuberance With Yellow Mane


One bright day a rack of years ago,
I stood next to an alpine pasture and saw
a palomino horse gallop across my gaze,
kick his rear legs up, fart as loud as gunshots,
and then run more. Jeter. That was his name.
A fat, friendly, pale yellow horse, was Jeter--
not dramatic. That day, though, his body
broke into a spirited sprint, went on a riff
of freedom, expressed an acrobatic comedy
of gas. He showed the bottom of his back-hooves
to the sky. He diveted that fenced turf.
Jeter had been called to the altar of joy,
and he came running in the sun, old
gassy Jeter, possessed exuberantly,
great to see.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Mountain Misery and Skunk Cabbage

(image: the plant commonly known as "Mountain Misery," or
Chamaebatia Species: foliolosa)


In the High Sierra, there are at least two plants with over-powering aromas: skunk cabbage (often found in marsh-like conditions but at high altitude) and mountain misery, which seems to grow in the shade and is most drought-tolerant. These plants are serious about the way they smell. They also cause arguments. Some people, like me, like the way they smell. Other people don't. I think people from the latter group gave the plants their common (as opposed to Latin) names.


Plants, Too

Of course creatures fascinated us. Like us
they'd ended up not in Paris or Perth but
in the High Sierra--by accident; or maybe
it was a career-move; who knows? Rattlesnakes,
skinks, lizards, ouzels, kildeers, owls, potato-bugs,
scorpions, deer, periwinkles, bears, raccoons,
bobcats, cougars, water-snakes, hawks,
and company charmed us like wizards.


The plants, too, cast a magic, though, rooted,
they were easier to ignore and less dramatic.
The way milkweed actually bled milk when
snapped, every time: so cool. How skunk-cabbage
(Lysichiton americanus) and mountain misery
embraced you with their odors like a boozy,
perfumed, vivid aunt: wow. Anis-stalks tasted like
licorice. Pine-sap softened by saliva turned
into gum. Take your chances with wild berries:
elderberries, yes; inkberries, no. We climbed


pines and firs, rode them as they
bent with the wind as flexibly as
grass-blades. What was the strangest
vegetation of all? I will say the snow plant,
Sarcodes sanguinea, bereft of chlorphyll.
It was less than creature but more
than plant. One day it would simply arise
beneath a tree in snow, bright red in Winter,
broadcasting a mute allure that suggested
it might not be a part of any timely scheme.
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom