"Drivin' Up 49," by Hans Ostrom, Lyrics, and The Uncle Charlie Band, music

"When Today Becomes Tomorrow (Pacific Crest Trail Song)," by Hans Ostrom...

"Sierra Nevada," by Hans Ostrom (lyrics) and The Blue Point Band

The Forest Belongs to the Forest

Inside a cabin

surrounded by Sierra forest,
we watch creatures
outside look at and into
the cabin. Sauntering,

nibbling grass, a doe
and two fawns stare
at us through a window.

Same goes for pine
squirrels, who leap
from tree to tree;
and for ground squirrels,
with their white
collars and flea-bedeviled
fur. And Steller's jays,
corvids with deep blue
bodies and black heads
& wild-mad-laugh cackles.

And at evening, a bear,
chief executive of the woods,
walks past, sniffing, slobbering,
almost not bothering
to look toward us.

hans ostrom 2023

The Golden Butterfly

In an old Gold Rush town's cemetery

on a hillside, summer, we were building
a cinder block enclosure for a family plot.

I stood up for a moment
to unkink the back and gazed
from the shade of the big
graveyard oaks, down the hill
to where brilliant sunlight shown.

I saw a golden butterfly
take its lazy, jagged, jazzy
flight into the light
and finally out of my vision.
Back to work.

The image has lived with me
since then, alighting like a butterfly
on a tall flower, lowering and lifting
its stiff, patterned wings,
trying to defy time.

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

William Tell Ravine

 [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.

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

Palomino Summer

I drank and drank and drank
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

Of Time and the Chickering

I like to give jazz standards
a good bruising on the old Chickering
parlor grand piano, which long ago
was rescued from the Buckhorn Lodge,
a bar in the High Sierra where whiskey
had been sloshed on some of the hammers.
Good times. I really can count
beats and measures, honest. But

I get distracted. I dawdle or rush,
freeze or trip. My fingers suddenly
turn into bear paws, then shrink
again back to size. Much depends
upon the weather, the atmospheric
pressure, the presence or absence
of crows in the area.  Anything
Ellington can mesmerize me,
and I start thinking about how
in the harlem he ever came up
with that chord or phrase. Sometimes

I just look into the deep brown
varnish of the Chickering, or stare
at the decal, Johnson Piano Company,
Portland, Oregon, and I wonder
what the route was from Boston
to Portland to Sierra City and finally
for a while, Tacoma, where the piano
had earned a restoration, where
it sat beside Cher's white piano,
which had also entered rehab.

I salve the blond
nicks with linseed oil
and always throw away
the rag. A tuner comes in
regularly, praises the tone,
rich and seasoned, whiskey-
tempered, long suffering
with regard to my drifts
into alternate space-time keyboards.


hans ostrom 2018

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

Kildeer

("The flight of the Kildeer is strong and rapid, and is at times protracted to a great distance. It skims quite low over the ground, or plays at a great height in the air, particularly during the love season, when you may see these birds performing all sorts of evolutions on wing."  audobon.org)

Kildeers, about the size of flickers,
screamed across the pasture, summers.
Their shrieks were very fine, accomplished,
their low, straight routes efficient.

Thank God I didn't try to make them
symbolize or teach: what a bore,
a lugubrious Wordsworthian chore. 
No. Just the kildeers, fast fliers,

loud criers, going fast from copse
of oaks to stand of pines. 


hans ostrom 2017

Millipedes and Words

Those armored locomotive tubes,
millipedes, lived with us, resting
on cool cinder-block walls
in our tomb-like living room.

We left them alone unless guests
were expected. (You know how
guests are.) Otherwise, they stank
too much to mess with, excreting

hydrogen cyanide, and their
innards were too awfully, softly
much. (I killed one in the bathroom
once.) If we'd lived in Thailand, say,

where millipedes aspire to be snakes
then some frontier shit would have
gone down. Since they were only of
several purple-brown inches, co-

habitation worked satisfactorily.
This arrangement was decided
silently, no family discussion
(the horror). Words were to be spent
on work, hilarity, or arguments.



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

Appointments in the Flatlands

In the '56 Chevrolet sedan, steel and wheels,
we barreled down and up and down three
canyons' worth of Sierra peaks. A mother,
an aunt, 2-3 kids, no seat belts, logging trucks
and steep killer drops to make it interesting.

Eight pistons pushed us through the forest.
Ma and Aunt sang folk songs in two-part
harmony, Clementine drowning and Tom
Dooley killing. I was the youngest in the car
and brooded on ghastly lyrics instead of

lightening up with the lilt. And I couldn't
sing worth a shit. If you looked close
out the window, you saw smears and blurs,
if far, you saw the forest staying still.
Breton would have envied the provincial

surrealism.  Berryman, D.D.S., soon
loomed, mustachioed. His tooth drill
was slow and sullen.  What did I know,
what did we know? Only that life
unfolds and boulders are everywhere.


hans ostrom 2017

Partial Report from Childhood

Heights: obviously perilous.
Snow: tedious, never
as pleasurable as they would
persuade you it is. Adults:
loud and/or tired. Family:

a pecking order and a proliferation
of comparisons. School:
40% cruelty, 50% boredom,
10% pleasure. Men: in charge,
even if no one knows why.

Women: perfumed, patient,
smarter than they act.
Girls: fascinating, mercurial.
Did I mention fascinating?

Books: reliable. The future:
an absentee landlord.



hans ostrom 2017

Nutritious, Too

It was a little bistro, as I recall, located
somewhere between Sierra City, California,
and Istanbul. "Tabula Rasa" was the name.
Minimalist dining. Never to be found using
GPS. Somehow they block the signal.

Minimalist dining. No decorations.
Simple wooden tables. Two kinds of soup,
one kind of bread, olive oil. One type
of salad, one entree. No specials.
Water and/or vodka. Table white, table red.

Servers wore white aprons and did
not reveal their names.  They opened
the conversation with philosophical
questions, such as, "Is language
a medium of deception?" (I think
I answered, "It depends." )

Ten different desserts, three ports,
several brandies and scotches.
Absinthe. It kind of sneaks up on you,
a place like that. Impressions are made
on your senses. Things about a bistro
of this nature catch in memory's webbing.

Yeah, and after the kitchen closed,
the dancers came out. The lighting
changed.  Tables disappeared. Short
surrealist films appeared on the walls.
I think of it now as a transformative
dining experience.


hans ostrom 2016

Haypress Creek Was Other

One reason you liked hiking up
around Haypress Creek was that
the woods were of full of naturally
selected life that went about
its business independent of you.
Sure, you and the woods &
the creatures there shared
oxygen and C oh two,
and bear or deer or snake
or squirrel might get in
your sight-line and you
in theirs. The pleasure

though came from disconnection,
guarded fascination. Curiosity.
The woods were other, light, and
deeply intricate. Some shitheads

built a dam on Haypress Creek
and added miles of pipe.
Hydraulic electricity. All
things were now connected.
The shitheads had seen
to that. You never hiked up there again.
Other had been disrupted.
Absurdly, you felt ashamed
and couldn't face the woods there.
A stupid Wordsworthian emotion,
useless.


hans ostrom 2015

Chicken-Killing Algorithm

1. Hear a father say, "The chickens aren't producing."
2. Surmise.
3. Look not forward to killing chickens.
4. Enter the chicken house.
5. Take a hen out of the chicken house.
6. Repeat 5.
7. Watch a father with a hatchet decapitate a chicken.
8. Watch headless chickens stride boldly, spurting blood from open necks.
9. Recoil mentally.
10. Dip chicken carcasses in hot water.
11. Inhale overwhelming wet-feather smell.
12. Pick feathers out of carcasses.
13. Become discouraged and bored.
11. Look at trees and sky.
12. Hear a father's curse-filled exhortations.
13. Surmise.
14. Continue picking feathers from carcasses until all carcasses are bald.
15. Think in terms of escape.
16. Look forward to escape.
17. Escape.


hans ostrom 2015