Rondeau for a Father's Hat

And what am I to do with my Dad's hat?

Always a hat--he never wore a cap.
After he died, I've kept it all these years--
A little token of him, it appears--
A cloth thing under which he sat.

His body was cremated, so that's that.
To me his soul's a mystery, not a fact.
While I get old and face some stern cold fears,
What is it I'm to do with my Pa's hat?

I have been charged with being a pack-rat.
I'm sentimental, unlike our deadpan cat.
For me, things link to people, it appears,
And maybe soothe a bit some grieving tears.
"Just let it go": advice that sounds so flat
Regarding what to do with Father's hat.

Hans Ostrom 2024

Under the Horizon

 [version two]

The Old Man got body-tired of 

and mind-bored with

labor about the same time.

Built his last rock wall at 70.

 

I thought of him today 

when I was chopping at a vegetable

garden's frozen mud in January.  

My mind let my body make my mind

think, "This shit is getting old."

How he would have phrased it. 

I felt like I thought  the sun

looks when it seems to drop

below the top of shadowed hills:

ready for bed. Of course there's more

work waiting under the horizon.

Pick and Shovel

Dig with a shovel, dig with a pen:
Heaney's formulation. This

morning I dug a shallow trench,
recalled my Old Man, Alec,
who taught me how to use a pick
and shovel right. The crucial
nuances. (I've never seen

a Hollywood movie in which
the digging and digger weren't
unintentionally ludicrous. Usually it
starts with the genre of shovel itself.)

Alec had dug everything from
blasted quartz gold ore to river
gravel mixing concrete, from
sewer-lines to stone-wall footings.
Also graves. Often he used a long steel bar
to make a boulder twice his
weight dance aside. In another

life, without a war, he would have
been a mining engineer or geologist.
He appreciated High Sierra rock
and soil. He never got frustrated
with them. Instead he stayed steady,
befriended leverage, let the tools
work. Piles of rock, piles
of dirt.  Soon the task melted.

Labor isn't poetry, but it has
a rhythm, rides repetition,
requires alert attention. By

the time finished the trench
today, old jeans and a paint-stained
shirt had siphoned pools of sweat,
and I as satisfied again with
the father I had had.


hans ostrom 2018

Under the Horizon

Thinking today of how like all workers
the Old Man got body-tired of and bored
with labor about the same time, like me
today chopping at a vegetable garden's
frozen mud in January.  Your mind

lets your body make your mind
think, "This shit is getting old."
You feel like you think the sun
looks when it seems to drop
below the top of shadowed hills:
ready for bed. Of course there's more
work waiting under the horizon.


hans ostrom 2016

"The Cabin at Lavezolla Creek," by Hans Ostrom

When we built the Jones cabin
up Lavezolla Creek, summer,
Sierra Nevada, we left home
in the loaded pickup and worked
ten-hour days. The droning drive
in the '69 Ford F-100
took an hour one way.

The Old Man was nearing 60 years
then. At noon he'd take a cat-nap
on the plywood sub-floor, his silver
lunch-bucket the pillow, his hat
over his eyes. Snored. I remember
something like pity arising in me.
Now I'm sixty, the Old Man's been dead
a long time, and I ended up with
the green Ford pickup, which people
think is "cool." The recall

of bright summer, big conifers,
the quick creek, and work to make
you bone tired seems now like
something that will disappear soon,
like a butterfly or pine-pollen
floating in lustrous air. These tributary
memories that shape our maps
of ourselves disappear as we do.
No one will remember that the Old Man
and I were the crew.



hans ostrom 2014

My Father Does Disapprobation

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)
)
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My Father Does Disapprobation


Jesus Christ Almighty! my father used to say,
not speaking to, of, or for Jesus but to one or more
of his three sons, who had done something maybe
not even wrong but just imperfectly. He could be
thunderous in his disapprobation, which is a word
I never heard him say.  He was the Jehovah

of our family--and an atheist: no competition.
Jesus Christ Almighty HIT the sonofabitch!!
he'd shout--concerning a sledge-hammer,
wielded by one of us, at a wooden stake.

A mere stake being driven into the mere ground!
Disproportionate furor! Magnificent, in its own
way, and in its own way Judeo-Christian: Old School.


Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom