Belief

The first time I heard my father pronounce,

"When we die, we're meat for the worms,"

I was about ten. He repeated the wisdom

occasionally. He thought "preachers"

were hustlers. Ma ran away from her 

evangelical minister father when she 

was 18. He was a bigot and a creep. 

She never worshipped publicly again,

thought of Heaven, I think, 

as an earned vacation. She gave me

her leather-bound Bible, Oxford U.

Press, all of Jesus's words in red. 

I joined the Catholic Church

at age 45, but my "worship" consists

of giving food to the parish's

food bank and trying to be kind. My

wife's the real Catholic and prays for me,

in both senses of "for." As to God,

who knows? Believing isn't knowing.

Nor is atheism. I'm too busy fearing

humans--of every belief, including

atheism, to fear God.  It never surprises

me to see that another American 

Christian has turned out to be evil.

Sometimes evil and popular.

After my college

History of Philosophy class, taken

at age 17, I never stopped thinking

Spinoza had it right: God equals

everything there is, but probably

no more. A cold view, true. 

Of course, the Jews expelled him,

the Christians condemned him,

and Leibniz envied him. 

Spinoza made a living grinding lenses. 

It's a true fact, as we say

in the American West, 

that the body disintegrates.

Aging gives it a head start. 

The universe is too big, 

dynamic, and complicated

for us to understand

all the way, but I say to science:

keep trying.

We should concentrate on peace, 

equity, and care of Earth. Make these

our primary worship. Keep it

simple-like, you know?

hans ostrom 2022

Dialectic

Mother, gather. Father,
proffer. Mother, other.
Father, farther. Mother,
smoother. Father, rather.

Mother, feather. Father,
weather. Mother, mystery.
Father, factory. Mother,

whisper woe, oh
no. Father falter slow.
Father go, gone.
Ma, Pa, dead,

dust, as they
must, as we
must, just so
very soon. And

the moon here
from the first,
once of Earth,
round and round.


hans ostrom

Found Poem: The Shit Parents Say

Parents don't notice
that the shit
they say
actually hurts.


alicelock, Tumblr.

Red Polka-Dot Dress

[re-posting this one from another blog, Red Tales]


There is a photograph of his mother wearing a dress with red polka-dots on a white background. The photograph is a color print from the negative film of a snapshot taken after the mid-point of the 20th century.

This is the most famous dress his mother owned, as things turned out. He thinks about her putting it on that day to get ready for the party, a summer-party in the High Sierra. He thinks of her thinking that the party will be a good time, an open field of behavior, an earned respite from the work of raising three children and tending one husband in rugged country 4,500 feet above sea level.

The son knows she doesn't, on that day, see the dress as a symbol in so many words or thoughts. But he imagines she looks at herself in the circular mirror of the "waterfall" bureau, imagines she sees the dress contrasting with her deep summer tan and blue eyes just so. The image she sees is attractive, and it satisfies her. The party is going to happen. She and her husband are hosting the party. The husband is not an easy husband to have. His personality is as hard and well defined as a sheer stone bluff in the Sierra. He is a rugged, overwhelming man, with a grudge against life that's masked by a child's sense of mirth, a prophet's sense of will, a peasant's capacity to toil, and a glad smile as broad as a highway-billboard. Luckily, liquor makes him gladder still. The son knows the mother knew of other women's husbands whom liquor made mean, made violent.

At the party, there will be work but also other women to do the work, so the work will seem like part of the party. There will be laughter, liquor, and food--and several compliments about the dress, which seems that day to be the perfect summer-dress, sleeveless, cotton, red polka-dots on a white background. Everyone at the party will know a great deal about World War II, hard work, the Great Depression, and the English language as spoken colloquially in the United States of America.

None of it will escape the avalanche of time, although snapshots, saving the dress, and nonfiction writing are amusing tactics of delay, the poignant motions of an amateur magician's hands, with Death sitting in the audience like the bald figure in Bergman's The Seventh Seal.

Thank God, he thinks, his mother didn't come close to thinking thoughts as melodramatic as "none of it will escape the avalanche of time," etc., that day. Thank God his mother never saw The Seventh Seal and asked him questions about the film. He would have tried to answer the questions, and his mother would have remained unconvinced by the answers. She would have disliked the film as much as she disliked puppets of any kind.

The white dress with red polka-dots fit, the alpine sun shone, friends and acquaintances arrived, and everyone acted as if they weren't about to die, and when people act that way, and they should, they seem untroubled and, indeed, immortal.

By his accounting, all the adults who attended that party are dead. The polka-dotted dress hangs in the closet of a daughter-in-law, and one of the cousins, the many cousins, painted a watercolor featuring the dress hanging on a clothesline. The dress is a cut and stitched quaint decorated piece of cloth. The snapshot lies between pages on a shelf somewhere.

Everything is taking place and changing at a speed humans cannot, do not, and best not comprehend fully. In a way, the party was over before his mother ever put on the dress, but she didn't see it that way, and that day, that's part of what mattered, he thinks.

The scandal of time is that it allows humans just enough time to arrange their thoughts and manage their habits so as to avoid confronting the scandal of time every moment. Scandalously, time makes routine seem reasonable and a bright dress permanent, and it makes summer-parties seem like a fair exchange.