At Paddington Station

At Paddington Station, in a tunnel

just off the platforms, you want to capture

images of faces & bodies with memory

not camera--the ancient pickling mode.

Impossible. Commuting workers

stride with purpose verging on menace.

Tourists--sluggish, confused, quarrelsome,

sweaty, laden. . . . The tunnel space

seems eager to ingest people (it has

seen them all already, the Alis and

the Bens, the Antonios, Angelikas,

and Vlads, the Prufrocks, Sukis,

Eriks, and Khans). Such tunnels

snake like arteries through urban

bodies, delivering toil to the maw

of the Economy, serving sweat-labor

and schticks of expertise, nutrients

of the perpetual Now. The proper

English woman's voice narrates

train-info ("with breakfast service

to Swansea"), a positive-thinking

pigeon head-thrusts into the mix,

content with crumbs. What a seething

thing is a big city, but every person

is still one person, loaded with duty,

aches, words, terrors, whole worlds

of thought hiding behind stoic faces. 

A mind among millions, holding on,

holding off insanity and defeat.

A large sign states WAY OUT. Its

message is a mirage. And so it is

if you're a certain you, you'll enter

stage-lit platorms to board a serpent-

snouted Great Wester Railway train

to Cardiff, from where you'll go to

Aberdare in search of dark grey

headstones and places where

the dead once walked, worked,

and wondered. They couldn't see

your present, the future. You can't

see their past, that present.

Ghost trains roll

by each other silently on tracks

laid down by Time. 

hans ostrom 2024

Talk in Cardiff

 

Big crowded restaurant next

to Mermaid Quay & my wife
steps out to take a call & I
focus on total sound of voices
talking--a liquid aural sculpture
of what bubbles, bursts, and flows
out of minds onto tongues & lips
& teeth. Fricatives and sibilants,
bumped rhythms, syncs and
overlaps, high-lows, quick stops,
clicks, loud cackles, the symphonic
babble of us. These folks

talk about, these eager eaters
paroled from homes, & they talk
to talk, as talkers do and must
& it's just good to listen
to the rich chopped salads of sounds
severed from sense--a dense
space, a tide. My wife returns

& I say, "What was she calling
about?" She says, "Oh, she
just wanted to chat."

"Hello, Goodbye, Swindon"

Hello, Swindon, where one

train passenger gets off,
gray clouds let a shaft
of sunlight through, and aluminum
chairs are perforated like
sheets of postage stamps.

The detrained woman sits
in one of these, puts
an allergy sprayer in both
nostrils, combs her gray
hair, sighs, and waits.

How interesting it must be,
I think, to grow up and live
in Swindon--in any place
without famine, war, and other
acute violence. The train

keeps going through tunnels
of green trees and brush,
as if landscape were a private
matter. Breaks in the vegetative
wall show hedgerows
and pastures (the discipline
of farms). Guernsey cows

give green grass a close
reading. Sheep gather
in fluffy, passive gangs. Dark
green, black-branched
oaks give off a Druid vibe.
Goodbye, Swindon.

From a Diary of the Plague Year (11)

Kangaroos boppin and hoppin
through Aussie towns,
wild boars busting loose
in Barcelona, mountain
goats getting grub in Welsh
villages. O, come all ye
species into empty human spaces
the plague has opened up for you.

Smog clears, the moon's
asthma's under control,
and the sun can dispense
with its monocle. Baby
sea turtles samba down
an empty beach, sand to sea,
small and free.

Rabbits in suburbia rejoice
Eagles monitor impromptu
migrations from CEO chairs
set up on the wind. Pet dogs
and cats form revolutionary
cells, having caught some
scents of rising wildness
from outside.


hans ostrom 2020

"The Visitor," by W.H. Davies