Piano Tuning

It creates a long, slow, aimless

tune, a dirge for a labor, blues

of the piano itself. Vibrations

that have wobbled and warped

get hauled back to pitch and harmony.

The tuner cranks a ratchet--

he's a melody mechanic,

an interpreter of intervals.

After a long slumber, 

the highest and lowest

notes wake up. The musicking

of tuning fills the room

with foreboding, making

a nest for songs that hands will

ask the piano to play later. 

Of Time and the Chickering

I like to give jazz standards
a good bruising on the old Chickering
parlor grand piano, which long ago
was rescued from the Buckhorn Lodge,
a bar in the High Sierra where whiskey
had been sloshed on some of the hammers.
Good times. I really can count
beats and measures, honest. But

I get distracted. I dawdle or rush,
freeze or trip. My fingers suddenly
turn into bear paws, then shrink
again back to size. Much depends
upon the weather, the atmospheric
pressure, the presence or absence
of crows in the area.  Anything
Ellington can mesmerize me,
and I start thinking about how
in the harlem he ever came up
with that chord or phrase. Sometimes

I just look into the deep brown
varnish of the Chickering, or stare
at the decal, Johnson Piano Company,
Portland, Oregon, and I wonder
what the route was from Boston
to Portland to Sierra City and finally
for a while, Tacoma, where the piano
had earned a restoration, where
it sat beside Cher's white piano,
which had also entered rehab.

I salve the blond
nicks with linseed oil
and always throw away
the rag. A tuner comes in
regularly, praises the tone,
rich and seasoned, whiskey-
tempered, long suffering
with regard to my drifts
into alternate space-time keyboards.


hans ostrom 2018

You Take Requests

You're performing every night
inside your head. You play piano,
you play shame. You play

dream flute and percussive
regret. You turn rain into harp
strings and fear into drums.

A low tuba of worry
supports an anxious violin.


hans ostrom 2018

Bartok and Stars

"The ways of life are infinite and mysterious."  --Georgio Scerbanenco, Traitors to All, translated by Howard Curtis


In spite of my playing, the piano
produced a simple minuet by Bartok,
which made me think of walking
cautiously across a frozen pond.

An empty coffee cup was sitting
on the bookshelf.  Cool ceramic.
Out there, and "up," night,
are stars, which we think of

as a permanent installation,
not a chaotic map of explosions
or freckles on an infinite face.
I dream recurrently about new

stars, close and bright,
flowing past in a sky-parade
as I look up from a meadow
in mountains and watch,

thrilled and terrified. I almost
forget to breathe. Someone I can't see
says, "Words are stars. I've
told you that before."


hans ostrom 2017

Emergency Music Medicine

Inspired by desperation
and a certain nausea brought on
by spectacles of hate encased
in blistered, feverish stupidity,

they started injecting
Duke Ellington's chords
directly into people's brains.
It couldn't hurt, they figured.

They brought on board
booster-shots of Bill Monroe,
Aretha, Coltrane, Rubenstein's
Chopin, and vials of other juice.

Hi-dee-high-dee hoping these
inoculations and antidotes
might re-humanize folks,
the worried inculcators

waited, seeking early signs
of logic, empathy, and wit.
I? I await reports. A bottle
of bourbon, which I haven't

touched in centuries, sits
on the battered piano,
which I have touched, pawing
ballads and blues like a badger.


hans ostrom 2015

"Piano Ready to Roll," by Hans Ostrom

A piano's lacquered
surface serrates light
from outside, turns it into
a gothic, cubist
rendering
of a keyboard
that looks
a bit like a bar-code.

As music, that image
might be from Monk
or Ives, James P. Johnson or maybe
Chopin
as phrased by Rubenstein. Anyway,
it's all invented and then
rearranged. By all I mean all.

And look, they bolted
this piano to a frame with three
big wheels. That's some serious
industrial-revolution nonsense.

So roll that lovely hunk of thumps,
shadows, and singing strings into
a misplaced bay where your
emotions go sometimes into exile.



hans ostrom 2014

"The Spell," by Paul Verlaine