Freight Ships

 Tacoma, Washington, USA

Anchored, freighters look like farm towns
burning necessary lights on dark fields.

Their crews, like miners, are unapparent.

We know these ships to be steel buckets,
as basic as water, profit, gravity, and greed.

We do not know why we stare at them

like art or why they  stare back
with the wise vacancy of cats.

hans ostrom 2024

© 2 days ago   

Airplane Mode

Taking off, the passenger plane

grunts like a sow and rattles
like a San Francisco streetcar.

Tacoma's port comes into view--
orange cranes, white warehouses bigger
than football pitches, a stack

puffing white smoke like
an old sailor. Shaggy green
Puget Sound island appears.

On the steel-blue water:
one fishing boat, one container ship,
both as still as sleeping cats.

Through horizontal pink and blue
smears, dark eyebrows arch:
tops of the Cascade mountain range.

Wet gridded neighborhoods
show, spotted with dark evergreens
and yellow & orange puffs

of dying leaves. Far out,
the freeway curves past
the light blue Tacoma Dome,

which looks like a hemispheric
quiz-show buzzer. Now white
clouds curtain the whole scene

& a voice cautions us
again to put all of our devices
on airplane mode.

It's Not Pretentious If You Don't Insist On It

(found language)

TACOMA YACHT CLUB
Boats Not Necessary




hans ostrom 2016

Nobody Beats Tacoma

Here's how it works: Beginning as North 27th Street,
North 21st Street just gets its confidence up
when North I Street slugs it and takes over,
only to be vaporized by South Yakima Avenue,
which morphs into something called Thomson.
The streets of Tacoma are so mean they're
mean to each other. Nobody beats Tacoma. Nobody.

Seattle has forever misread the meaning of Point
Defiance. It's not a park or a peninsula,
or a place to play dress-up on your bike.
It is a destined middle finger pointed
vaguely north. Put a penny
on the railroad track down by the port,
and you might well summon Guy Fawkes,
Richard Brautigan, a Chinese laborer,
or a skeptical Puyallup woman, pre-contact.
Whoever it is will take your penny
and invest it in a cloud-cone
hovering above Rainier like the saucers
Kenneth Arnold saw. About the time

you think you have Tacoma solved,
you find yourself on a suspension-bridge,
with a dog, and the bridge starts
writhing like a boa constrictor. Then
it flaps and twists, snapping itself
free from blueprints, taking a dive
like a punch-drunk stevedore
trying to earn a buck at a smoker
in 1931. The dog lives. If you tell

the tattooed woman at the drive-in
that you ordered everything on your
burger, she will tell you, without
animus, "That is everything."
Nobody beats Tacoma. You have
to understand: Tacoma is more
than a grit city that keeps its
bourgeoisie on a leash like a pit bull.
Tacoma is a sense of humor.

Once you get that, it may take decades,
you'll understand everything. I
mean, really, after embedding
yourself in a group of eccentrics
at the Parkway, the Acme, or
the Goldfish Redux, you'll see
the folly in naming streets
and other ambitions. You'll realize
you are Nobody, the only person
ever to beat Tacoma. Good night.


2015 hans ostrom

Frank Herbert, Gore Vidal, and Richard Brautigan Walk Into a Bar . . .

In Tacoma, at the apocryphal corner
of Brautigan and Herbert Streets,
you may hear worms singing plaintive blues.

Turn on, tune in, drop out:
what bullshit. Nothing's that
sequential in T-Town, and Dr. Leary
was Ownership, not Labor or
Management.

It's a long way from San Francisco,
especially by dune buggy on back roads,
through the mind-fields.

Call yourself a duchess, call yourself
a duke. Nobody really gives a shit
unless you buy a round of beers
and feed the pool table. Seven-ball
in the Montana pocket off
the Portrero Hill rail. You
have to call it first.

Gore Vidal was stationed near Tacoma,
but wrote over the episode
while serving his celebrity in Italy.

Shit can get complicated real fast
is the theme of every novel,
every life.


hans ostrom 2015

"Chihuly Glass," by Hans Ostrom

Stuck to a steel frame, pieces
of former fluid seem to float
like tadpoles
like kelp globes
like lily pads
like figures in foam atop a German beer.

Lick them; they are lollipops.
Mock them; they are bugs.
Cheer them; they are art.
Laugh: they are funny shapes.

Orange yellow blue curls
and tails and blotches and blobs
brought out from fire,
confused dough, vibrant mud.

Dear Light: the glass-artist
likes to invite you in
for a cup of mad tea
because hey you came
all the way from the sun.



hans ostrom 2014
Dale Chihuly

Commissioned Sonnet

Going through old computer-files and -documents, I found a sonnet I'd written that had been commissioned.  Someone from the Politics and Government Department where I teach (U. of Puget Sound) had asked me to write a poem to be read at their departmental graduation-gathering.  This was in 2008.

About all I can say for the sonnet is that it is worth at least what they paid me for it, nothing.

I thought a sonnet--or some traditional form--was appropriate for the occasion. Every so often, I like to write a "commissioned" thing.  It's an interesting challenge.

Commencement Bay is the name of the harbor next to Tacoma.


Sonnet: To Graduating Seniors in Politics and Government

We’ve been the captains of your classes here,

The admirals of your splendid senior theses.

Today we are mere ensigns of good cheer

As you depart these arches, bricks, and trees.

Your learning is your cargo. Politics

And Government’s the dock from which you sail.

The world out there is one we hope you’ll fix.

May warm and fairly traded winds prevail.

Now, after several years at Puget Sound,

You’ll voyage from your own Commencement Bay

To ports where possibilities abound.

With pride we raise a toast to you and say:

In governing your lives, be politic

And always vote for wisdom—that’s the trick.

Hans Ostrom, 2008, 2012

The Day's Amusements

At my local cafe, I almost always get an old-school beverage--espresso macchiato, two shots. Of course, my parents' generation regarded a CUP OF COFFEE as an old-school drink, which they never called a beverage. At any rate, today I ordered a steamed soy-milk with sugar-free vanilla flavor. The barista looked at me with grave disappointment and said, "And we thought we knew you."

So then, partly because it's tax-season, one with whom I live and I started talking finances. I had just learned that for one of our credit-cards, there are two accounts but one balance. I still don't understand how that works, and being confused, I started expressing my outrage at the world of finance. My conversational partner shook her head as if to say, "I know you too well," and she said the financial terminology I was using was completely wrong. I said, "And you know what's funnier than that?--I'm on a budget-committee where I work!" She tried to let me down easy by saying, "You're conceptually very strong. It's just that your terminology is awful." Well, kind of easy.

It's almost April, and it's almost snowing again in Tacoma. This is pretty much Unheard Of. It's as if the Weather God is saying, "Let's see, should I start Spring?. . . Nah." "Computer says nah," as Stephen Wright says. At least I think it's Stephen Wright.

Then there's this guy in L.A. with whom I'm working on a project, and he emails me via his phone from his boat out on the sunny Pacific. I understand how the technology works, but I'm still amazed by it, and I still want phones to weigh 50-60 pounds. I'm trying to tamp down my envy about the whole boat, sunshine, I-phone situation down there as I sit and watch snow-flakes attempt to form.

And I learned from a blogger that country/folk (and blues/gospel influenced) singer Kate Campbell sometimes reads my Emily/Elvis poem at concerts. How cool is that? She has some great subtle, surprising songs about Elvis. She's a terrific lyricist.

This isn't being sent from my I-phone as I lie on a boat in sunshine on the Pacific.

A T-Town Sonnet

Sonnet: Tacoma


Tacoma's tough. That's what you need to know
To start to get to know the town that is
A city which is reticent to show
The world a worldly face. Indeed, fact is,
Tacoma tells you to your face, "I'm me.
I'm trains and cranes and barges by the Sound.
I'm labor, boss, protester, cop, army."
To find a city anxious to be crowned,
Take I-5 north to where Seatttle's fed
To bursting with paté of pride. It needs
To feel the pat of status on its head.
Seattle thinks that T-Town's in the weeds.
Seattle may day-dream that it's Par-ee.
"Take it or leave it," says T-Town. "I'm me."


Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008