Alpine Lake

Sometimes the lake takes sunlight,

turns it into a deep blue

that might make you leave your mouth

open slightly like a child

just awake from a nap.

On some leaden summer days,

the lake quits moving, stays

so still it turns frog green.

Sluggish fish nap. Anglers

take their tackle-boxes home.

Giant bugs come and dance

on the water. At night?

At night the lake puts its colors

in an old drawer. It hums tunes

and talks to raccoons and owls

and hiding water fowls.

In Winter the lake turns white

with ice and snow--becomes

stationery from 1925 on which

you scribble pleas to Spring. 

Hans Ostrom 2024

Stillness

Stillness: a mountain lake’s

Sudden surface sheen: no wind—

A minnow  apparent.
The whole lake seems to pause.

Stillness in a city street, early
Morning. No traffic, tram, or shout.
You’re out and about, street surface
Wet and cool from rain. Now a man
Rolls up the metal barrier to his shop,
Gutting the poise with jagged noise.

Unsought stillness in your mind:
How rare. You sit amidst office
Busy-ness or stand away
A moment from manual labor. You
Stare, aware of nothing in particular
Beyond the stillness,
And the whole ongoing shock of
Voices, machines, and stress
Of survival-urge and toil evaporates
From your attention—until...

Until a brute gust
Cross-cuts the top of the lake
With surface tension,
And everything begins again.

Plausible

Wind so hard the lake-surface bristles, and because the word
Saturday appears above a box representing a date, the person,
categorized as a man, is not somewhere else but here, for
even in so called off hours everyone is regulated. He's

hunched inside a coat, hearing wind so hard it whistles
through reed stalks and he notes he can't distinguish
between a vaguely recalled sadness and this day's
specific one, as if all pumice-gray clouds were one smear

across one sky he's lived under, wind so hard his ears
ache, and he knows eventually he'll do something called
"the sensible thing," and his legs will move him toward
something called a "house," but he like standing in muck

near the whipped up lake because standing here seems
like the one thing that hasn't been arbitrarily labeled,
wind so hard now his nose runs, and he mutters,
"whatever you say," which encapsulates what he's felt

like saying to everything from STOP-signs to tweets
to good-mornings to cityscapes and his own name
and all the names for things, including life--life?
Whatever you say, wind so hard it blows a bird

sideways and the man's chilled deep and grateful
for that and walks buffeted back toward sensible
things, wind so hard it's almost but not quite
made life plausible today.


hans ostrom 2016