Names and Us

All of it seemed to have been named before

we arrived—everything from

milk to mountains, trowels

to trapezoids, angst to alliteration;
also blue-bottle flies, faith,
obsidian, and warts.

We did what we could.  We
morphed words so they labeled
nothing except pleasure our mouths
and minds felt saying, hearing:
Bibble the lubble, Mr. Nubble.

We named imaginary friends,
including Princess Her and Eddie.
What was not a fort (a collapsed
shack) we called Fort, what was
not food (mud), Pie. 

They sent us to school to study names
systematically.  They told
stories about their lives.  Names
recurred in these tales.  We listened.
Invisible emotional currents began
to buzz our psyches.  Later we
might name such currents Fear or
Loneliness, knowing such naming to be
not enough. We began to know
and respect the Unnamable, which
seemed to be where all the action was.

Society manufactured alps
of new things & advertising
name them--pills, cars, gadgets,
political cults, on and on. We
learned and bought.

We grew malevolently bored with names
we’d known a long time, with things
to which these names were attached.  Our
world seemed choked by names.
We named our condition Life.  That
was a mistake.

ostrom 2022

Sunday's Villanelle

A Little Something That Refrains


Let's write a little something that refrains
From trying to be more than poetry.
The language moving in a poem obtains.

For language is an actor, plays and feigns,
And hopes we'll see what it wants us to see.
Let's write a little something that refrains

Itself in lyric and won't grab for gains,
But is content simply to seem and be
The language, moving. In a poem, "obtains"

Can take an object or refuse. The lanes
Of speech form labyrinths. Let's drink some tea.
Let's write a little. Something that refrains

Might well refresh. The mind's eye strains
Relentlessly, desires profundity.
The language moving in a poem obtains:

It's there like creeks and rivulets from rains.
Word-lovers lap up language happily.
Let's write a little something that refrains.
The language moving in a poem obtains.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Sentencing

Sentencing

Your sentence is to write a sentence.
Your crime is having conspired
to kidnap a thought and confine it
to words. By writing a sentence,
you serve your sentence. Meanwhile,
you appeal the verdict, claiming
the thought did not pre-exist

the sentence. In your appeal,
you write, "Neurons were at play,
impulsive electricity coursed
through my cranium, but no
thought truly formed until
I was sentenced to write the
sentence, which is the form of
thought, which is no thought
without form." Your audience

appreciates the irony
of your situation, sentencing
having provided the evidence
for your conviction. Your
audience notes the conviction
with which you wrote your
appellate sentence, but
in a formal clause, it
dismisses your appeal,
and so you serve your sentence.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom