Staring Becomes the Fourth Line

A corner of a ceiling:

could be in any squarish
building anywhere on Earth.

Three lines intersect, dissolve
into a point. Maybe where you
are now, you find a corner to see.

Seeing, you might get transfixed,
the familiar becoming strange.
Shade versus light. Axioms

versus wood, plaster, stone,
paint,,,, Or: just that thing
which staring or even

imaginging in darkness
can do: hold your mind, bind
it; tug, coax, seduce it. Staring,
sight becomes the fourth line.

hans ostrom 2025

Horizon

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Horizon

No one can measure the distance to
the horizon, only the distance from it.

The horizon doesn't exist, but it must.

One must determine the place between
high tide and low tide, then measure up

to the point from which one wants to

envisage the horizon, which is a fiction
resting on a line by the angle above sea-

level from which one overlooks ocean. Okay?

There is no fixed point to the horizon,
or to measurement, or to looking at the sea,

or even to living next to the ocean, a notion.

There is a sea, a coast, two tides, a triangle
tied to a plane on a sphere. Let's grant these,

please. There is no horizon, except insofar,
so far, as something seems to end out there

a certain uncertain distance from here. There

is no distance like show-distance to the horizon
because if one travels it, the distance, then

the horizon will have moved away. Nonetheless,

one is free to measure by the sea. They can't
take that away from thee. One is free to look

and to say, "Look, there's the horizon." Okay?

Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom