Beside the Ocean With a Baby

  for Henry

I'm sitting next to the ocean
in San Diego, a year-old baby
on my lap.

White-edged waves
roll over surfers' heads
like ripples of cream.

A mesmerizing dream,
the sea, at its edge.
The baby and I

Listen and see. We
watch and hear. We
feel the wind.

A cormorant glides
down--from where?--lands on
blue-grey glassy water.

A Quick Fog

Today's fog seems like a soul

caught in a purgatory,
shunned by earth, air, fire,
and water but also of all four.

It rises up out of earth,
tumbles from air, fills itself
with water, and imitates smoke.
Today it rides down from hills

in San Diego, cools the brown
young women in scant bikinis
and the young men trying
to impress them. It blocks

the dropping dun. It wants
to befriend the moon's waves,
which ignore it and pound
the beach. Right before dusk,

the fog lifts, leaves like a hobo
hopping a train to Mexico.

Date Palms in San Diego

 [slightly revised]

Calm palms in San Diego look like crooked

columns composed of brown-gray stones stacked

slowly over years by Franciscan monks. When

the columns reach a height uncertain, bladed

fronds formally erupt. Golden dates

materialize, suspend themselves like surreal

swarms of gemstones. A brown-grey bird

stretches upside-down to pick a piece

of date-flesh with its beak. Pacific breezes

nudge softly like seduction. The tapered

columns bend, nod, never topple. Flexibility

of vegetation, patience of stone: palm.

hans ostrom 2021

Black's Beach

(the clothing-optional beach near San Diego)

The heavy sand is as black as the stuff
that abides with gold in the Sierra.

Black-suited surfers march
along the beach in martial service
to the obsession. A nude

woman enacts yoga poses,
and I wonder why they never
offered that kind of thing
in high school physical education.
A solid replacement for
the badminton unit.

I sit naked on a purple towel
laid out on a washed-up wooden pallet.
There are other old washed-up
hippies (not the most accurate word,
but it will do) who dot the beach
in stupendous sunshine and fresh air.
Erosion-scarred brown bluffs rise above us.

I suppose we're absently wondering
where all the parties went to.
Answer: nowhere.  They just go on
without us. Somewhere we got

separated from our pods and
ended up on this beach.

It's not a big gulp of freedom.
Only a sip or two. Now a brown
young woman wades out into surf,
presents her body to the ocean,
dips her hands into the water
as if it were cool liquid silver.

She brings her hands to her face.
She runs her fingers through her hair.
I lie back like an old sea lion
and close my eyes.


hans ostrom 2016

"Date Palms in San Diego," by Hans Ostrom

Date-Palms

Apparently there are about 10 varieties of date-palms--palms trees that bear the fruit, date, which is alleged to be a highly nutritious food. I had opportunity to stare at a couple date-palms in San Diego recently. It was a privilege.



Date-Palms in San Diego


Calm palms in San Diego look like crooked
columns made of brown-gray stones stacked
slowly over years by Franciscan monks. When
the columns reach a height uncertain, bladed
fronds formally erupt. Golden dates
materialize, suspend themselves like a surreal
swarm of gemstones. A brown-grey bird

stretches upside-down to pick a piece
of date-flesh with its beak. Pacific breezes
push. The tapered columns bend, nod,
never topple. Flexibility of vegetation,
patience of stone: palm.


Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Moisture

I called a good friend in San Diego today and told him that in the Northwest, we were experiencing a day of cold wind and hard rain. He said in San Diego it was, well, San Diego; sunny. I cursed gently, insincerely, and humorously; still I was envious.

A good day, then, to consider moisture, a word that, in English, goes back to the medieval period (according to the OED online), specifically to medieval philosophy, which at that time incorporated science. The word referred to the liquid inherent in animals and plants, and often it was called "radical moisture." One etymological root of "radical," apparently and ironically, is "root." So I guess radical moisture was natural moisture--the water infused in the tissue, if that's the right term, of plants and animals.

Here's a poem that meditates on moisture. I think the poem is more medieval than radical.

Moisture: A Study

Cleopatra’s perspiration; water her slaves
drank; Rasputin’s mucous; my great-aunt’s
tears, dispatched when, in Sweden’s north,
she discovered she was pregnant by
Sig the traveling fiddle-player; sweat on
Sig's fiddle-strings; denatured
alcohol of perfume dabbed behind an
ear before a party; party in which the
room gets humid because of human heat;
saliva I expressed
that summer we built the long stone wall
beside the cemetery; water in the mortar
of that wall: any of this and all other
historical moisture might reside in raindrops
dimpling a fish-pond I stare at now
using moist eyeballs. It’s no news we’re
mostly water, so after we die, most of what was
us is in earthly circulation—puddle, Pacific,
creek, blizzard, mist; also in other bodies
full of water, rats in Paris, a cat in Nairobi,
a toad napping next to damp gravestones,
not to put too fine a point on it.

Copyright 2007