Monday, December 11, 2023
Inward Sea
Friday, September 1, 2023
Nose to the Glass
Certain scenes keep coming around
like mail delivery. You recall bad
behavior. It begs at once for
regrets and excuses, which,
combined like soda and vinegar,
merely fizz. You invent arcs
in your life, heroic ups and downs.
You list alleged achievements.
You indict, forgive, forget, fudge,
and, exhausted, give in to fatalism.
You keep this silly sense of Self
afloat like a raft on a slow river.
No, it's more like Self's just a
habit, like a mannequin in a
window you walk by compulsively
or stare at, nose to the glass.
Wednesday, February 15, 2023
Crowded Mind
invited maybe, mostly not: memory's
a wicked host. Ah, yes, Billy in
second grade, you were mean to him,
once, and it's haunted you since then
(if alive, Billy has forgotten you, of course).
Brown Lucina, seductive at 17, clouds
of perfume, precocious bust, she took
your arm and waltzed you to algebra class,
summoning an erection. Our
mental space: elastic, stuffed--
guilt, desire, nostalgia & the rest
howl like barkers outside clubs &
you can't say "Get out!" til it's
too late. You don't get to talk
as faces rush in, except perhaps
in some sad revisionist script:
you with your loser's bon mot.
Wednesday, March 3, 2021
oh memory, oh winter bee
city, a golden continent, a
paisley planet. but if you ventured
to Past, you'd land
in a swamp of minutes,
a humidity of duties,
nettles of the now,
and the who you were then.
my god, memory's a façade,
a sliding presentation to yourself,
the greatest hits and duds.
life is thick as mud, as
tangled as a junkyard,
an all-at-once crammed
into thimbles and shot glasses.
you long to go back sometimes,
a winter bee honeyed with glee
for the buzzing of what was.
you can't go, because and because.
Friday, January 8, 2021
Idiosynchronized
People we see once: flood of faces, coats,
collars--on avenues and plazas, in markets,
theatres, bars, banks, hospitals. A bent
shape hoeing weeds: one of us saw it once
one place from a train: This
is an example but only of itself. Its
singularity can’t be transposed. Imagine
you remember the person who interested you
terribly in that café that morning that city.
Sure it happened, but you don’t remember
because once was not enough. People we
see once compose our lives. Forgetting
them (we must), we lose wide arenas
of the lived. Even ghosts return, but not
the vast mass of once-only-noticed
who compose medium and matrix
of our one time here. We are adjacent and
circumstantial to strangers, one jostle
of flux away from knowing next to everything
about their lives. The river of moments takes
a different channel; the one moment becomes nothing now.
The once-only appear, then appear to go
to an Elsewhere that defines us. They go on
to get to know who they get to know.
Their lives are theoretically real to us, like
subatomic particles. To them their lives
are practically real to them. From their
view, ours are not. We know they were there,
vivid strangers, because they always are,
every day. Like a wreath floating
on the ocean, memory marks a space
abandoned. In large measure life is
recall of spaces occupied. History
consists of someone who insists on being
remembered, someone who insists on
remembering, combinations of both. Familiarity
and routine join to vie methodically; they
capture places in recall. Vivid strangers are
incidentally crucial, indigenous to a
present moment that is like a mist
over a meadow, rising, evaporating
just when we arrive, past as we are present.
Saturday, August 1, 2020
"Tawny," by Carl Sandburg
Friday, December 6, 2019
What Happened to What Happened
to what happened. It sits
right here in my hand
like a small bird,
a little bit of sand,
or a few notes that fell
out of a song.
hans ostrom 2019
Sunday, June 30, 2019
Palomino Summer
sunshine.
I walked down
powder-dust ruts of an uncle's
dirt road and found that palomino.
Blond horse, quick as fragrance. Blond
summer, baking brown mud. Blond
grass, insane with grasshoppers.
Brown me in the the midst,
palomino's mane brushing my arms
in the rush of gallop. In the woods
next to the ranch, rattlesnakes
coiled, field mice inside them.
Pine trees leaned toward
the pasture I rode in.
hans ostrom 2019
Friday, June 7, 2019
A Statistic and I
on average 153,424 people
die each day. Globally.
That's a terrible thing
to tell someone, I thought,
before thinking of the
galaxies of memory
the minds of 153,424
contained before they
vanished.
hans ostrom 2019
Monday, April 29, 2019
The Very Nowness of You
ballad composed by Ray Noble)
The nowness of you
in your motion and thinking,
the present rectitude of your
existence, with earrings, as
it happens (it happens)--
this is separate from our life
together. Our life together
is an invisible sculpture
representing our ideas
and memories of us. It's
exhibited in the gallery of days.
The you right-now-here is
someone and something
to be discovered, and it seems
I just discovered you one
more time. I find it quite exciting.
hans ostrom 2019
Wednesday, May 2, 2018
College Test in May
a contract with memory.
sunlight in windows
hans ostrom 2018
Friday, February 9, 2018
Cigar Smoke is Thick and Blue
--psychiatrist Allen Wheelis (1950), who credited the statement to Freud
Sometimes a cigar
isn't a cigar, such as after
it's been smoked
and the remaining brown wad
has gone away.
Then the cigar
becomes particles
as well as neural bits
of cigar-likenesses,
or a word in a story
about that one night
and its cigars.
hans ostrom 2018
Friday, December 29, 2017
Remember, You Know?
Remember to know.
December and snow:
Remember? September,
remember, is a different
month, and November's
hardly a June. So
long ago. So long, Ago!
Words are diplomats
They mean to know.
All are members
of the Memory Chateau.
hans ostrom 2017
Friday, December 1, 2017
A Composed Affair
as clearly as if
it had happened a long
time ago, which it
did, but not before
starting as an impromptu,
developing into an etude,
going through a prelude
to get to some
energetic nocturnes,
with several scherzos,
rondos, and sarabands
included for good pleasure.
The affair ended
as if by composed
design, how refreshing.
The final note
was held but not
amplified or for long.
hans ostrom 2017
Tuesday, July 25, 2017
Today in Memory World
of pretending to recover
time by accessing images
of spaces-past and a few
of the people in them then,
including us. It's a strange
system, but it's about all
we have. Meanwhile, we
continued to float down the
river for the first and last time.
hans ostrom 2017
Monday, February 16, 2015
"Memory Unit"
euphemistically. We
watch the very old and almost
mindless sit or lie like reptiles
that are waiting for the warmth
to come back. These wait
for the memory-sun
to unset itself.
Our uncle is among them here.
What are we supposed to say
to the past, which is absent?
What are we supposed to do
with our rage and embarrassment
before this scandal, this
crucifixion of identity?
We keep our visits short,
is what we do. For a while,
in our conveyance later, we
are as quiet as the Memory Unit.
Then someone speaks. We understand.
We speak back. We're understood.
hans ostrom 2015
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
"The Cabin at Lavezolla Creek," by Hans Ostrom
When we built the Jones cabin
up Lavezolla Creek, summer,
Sierra Nevada, we left home
in the loaded pickup and worked
ten-hour days. The droning drive
in the '69 Ford F-100
took an hour one way.
The Old Man was nearing 60 years
then. At noon he'd take a cat-nap
on the plywood sub-floor, his silver
lunch-bucket the pillow, his hat
over his eyes. Snored. I remember
something like pity arising in me.
Now I'm sixty, the Old Man's been dead
a long time, and I ended up with
the green Ford pickup, which people
think is "cool." The recall
of bright summer, big conifers,
the quick creek, and work to make
you bone tired seems now like
something that will disappear soon,
like a butterfly or pine-pollen
floating in lustrous air. These tributary
memories that shape our maps
of ourselves disappear as we do.
No one will remember that the Old Man
and I were the crew.
hans ostrom 2014
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
"Thinking at a Funeral," by Hans Ostrom
private,unfounded beliefs (blue underwear
will bring me luck)will die
with each of us,
along with the complex cultures
we create in our minds, whereas something
truly silly like labeling water H-2-0
will persist indefinitely. I was
thinking this at a funeral when
I was supposed to be listening
to a "friend" of the deceased
talk almost exclusively about
himself, not the life of
the dead man. Dear Lord:
there are over 7 billion
vagabond human minds on Earth;
please advise.
hans ostrom 2014