She's Making Changes

So I'm dropping off my weekly

sack of canned food & baby formula
to a food bank when
an older woman pushing
a shopping cart stops to declaim:

"I'm changing my name
and my birthday," she says,
her speech not hampered
much by missing teeth. "Two
years ago on my birthday,
I got hit in the face with a baseball
bat. This year on my birthday,
I got hit by a U-Haul truck."

I want to ask what new name
she's chosen and maybe the fresh
birthday but instead say,
"That's terrible," one of my go-to
expressions of sympathy. She
scowls and says, "I know it's
terrible. You think I'm an idiot?"
"No, ma'am," I say, and scamper
with my bag toward the food bank.

hans ostrom 2024

Hans

Hans, pronounced hands

in my case: my name. A
version of John, Juan, Evan,
Giovanni....Such school

nicknames as Fingers,
Hansburger & Hanzy
have caromed off it.

When I was 6, I asked
my mother if I could change
my name to "just plain Bill."
"No," she said. Parenting
by edict was in style then.
For years the tale of the request
made the rounds in the extended
family. (You're welcome!)

A Jewish professor
in graduate school, after I'd
known him a while, asked
me if my first name was German.
"No, Swedish," I reported.
He looked relieved. I felt
relieved he look relieved.
Neither of us named
what we felt. Now I wear

my Hans like an old
friendly flannel shirt.
Names! Like invisible
back-packs. Like signs
above the shops of us.
We answer to our name,
and for it.

hans ostrom 2023

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

"Pick Up Your Meds"

You might have to fall in love
with the names these pharmaceutical
oligopolies give to medicine--
fantastic nouns with neon
syllables like zan, zac, zole,
perc, pram, lam, and zone. Even
the oligopolies have a
med-moniker: Big Pharma.

It's the synthetic language
of weary magic-acts from last
century plus the detached
lingo of advertising that is
always floating above our heads.

We learn the names quickly when
the stuff's prescribed to us
or when we buy it on the street.
We learn them not at all when
it's not or we don't.

We go between docs and pharmacists
as mere messengers. Our bodies
wait patiently like bovines
for the med-food to be added
to our cuds. Where

science, chemistry, capital,
ailment, and diagnosis meet,
chants from a hybrid incantation
get printed
on bottles that are never clear.


2015 hans ostrom