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

Salamander Row

I'm going down to Salamander Row,
where the quick, cool creek plays jazz
of its running for ferns and moss.

I'm going down to Salamander Row
to lose my sense of loss.
Beneath overhanging branches,

the salamanders live moistly
as meditative creatures. They
aren't teachers, but I learn

from their calm there, and the
shaded ambiance of Salamander
Row creates a balm there.



hans ostrom 2017

Certain Beverages

Hot chocolate is independent, comforting, and interesting,
like a tastefully dressed and perfumed woman
sitting at a bar who knows how to hold a conversation.

A shot or more of vodka is like a broad, iced
highway when you've just been handed
the keys to a black Corvette with failed
headlights and bald tires.

A German beer from the tap
is a highly trained, reserved professional,
absolutely dependable.

If you specify the red wine as Beaujolais,
then I will want to be of assistance
to multiple French women at once,
most likely in October, in Paris, and forgive me
if, momentarily, I confuse the situation
with paradise. As to retsina,

God help me, I did love it, as one
might love an athletic, deceptively
savvy woman from a rural province.

If you would ask me about God,
I would refer you to clean alpine creek-water.


hans ostrom 2016

"Far in a Western Brookland," by A.E. Housman

"Why?" by Walter de la Mare

Lyric Craving

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Lyric Craving


Sometimes I crave a lyric poem
That springs like a clear creek,
A regulated rush of words
To zap a weary week.

A yellow butterfly in air,
A jet-trail frozen high:
Such images are welcome, too.
They fill the lyric eye.

In Housman and in Dickinson;
In Langston; Auden, too.
There's often something sharp and quick.
The words are right and few.

I'll go read these, and others, too:
The Spare Ones, let us say.
I'll sip the water from the creek
And slake the thirst today.

Copryight 2009 Hans Ostrom

Creeks

Creeks



Should you be granted the luxury
of listening to a creek, you'll hear
sounds inside sounds, trickles within
rushes, and a constant water-sigh,
an exhalation of sound. Memory
hears names of alpine creeks: Deer
Creek, Haypress Creek, Hackman
Ravine. There's the unnamed creek
that carries water from the abandoned tunnel
of the Monarch Mine. Each of these

creeks featured an improvised mix
of bedrock and gravel, bank and bar,
riffle, pool, fall, foam, and whirl. Each
had systems of life--bird, bug, moss,
brush, fern, trout, worm. Sometimes
a deer: touching the glassy top of water
with a glossy black nose. Sometimes

something demanded
your respect--for example, a bear
making a splash of things and broadcasting
its bear-body, bashing brush, looking
at the creek as if the creek might be
swallowed in a gulp. A few times there

was I, absolutely incidental to the watershed,
hiking through holy sunlit days, flicking a fly
out on a leader, watching for fish, breathing
in shadows of ancient cedars, listening
to creek-water as it dropped into this
pool, space and time.

Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008