"A Map of the World," by Roger Illsley (Lyrics) and the Brewer Street Band

At Paddington Station

At Paddington Station, in a tunnel

just off the platforms, you want to capture

images of faces & bodies with memory

not camera--the ancient pickling mode.

Impossible. Commuting workers

stride with purpose verging on menace.

Tourists--sluggish, confused, quarrelsome,

sweaty, laden. . . . The tunnel space

seems eager to ingest people (it has

seen them all already, the Alis and

the Bens, the Antonios, Angelikas,

and Vlads, the Prufrocks, Sukis,

Eriks, and Khans). Such tunnels

snake like arteries through urban

bodies, delivering toil to the maw

of the Economy, serving sweat-labor

and schticks of expertise, nutrients

of the perpetual Now. The proper

English woman's voice narrates

train-info ("with breakfast service

to Swansea"), a positive-thinking

pigeon head-thrusts into the mix,

content with crumbs. What a seething

thing is a big city, but every person

is still one person, loaded with duty,

aches, words, terrors, whole worlds

of thought hiding behind stoic faces. 

A mind among millions, holding on,

holding off insanity and defeat.

A large sign states WAY OUT. Its

message is a mirage. And so it is

if you're a certain you, you'll enter

stage-lit platorms to board a serpent-

snouted Great Wester Railway train

to Cardiff, from where you'll go to

Aberdare in search of dark grey

headstones and places where

the dead once walked, worked,

and wondered. They couldn't see

your present, the future. You can't

see their past, that present.

Ghost trains roll

by each other silently on tracks

laid down by Time. 

hans ostrom 2024

Broken Airport

 The terminal takes its name literally,

is a disintegrating destination.
Flights cancelled, transport stuck.
Even a nun mouths the word, "Fuck."

Inside haggard people and swollen luggage
congeal like snow outside. The enraged become
resigned; the patient, stupefied. Jabbed
and punched by questions, employees
in company colors look like boxers
in late rounds. Everyone begins to resemble

everyone else. Distinctive personalities
melt into smeared canvas of weariness,
smothered rage, drunkenness, and hysteria.

People become their uncomfortable bodies.
Quickly clothes and hair get greasy.
Clean diapers become Black Market
currency. Bartenders become celebs.

Some people stand at windows,
achieve Zen peace by staring at airplanes
now ridiculous--aluminum sculptures
on tiny wheels, their cruising altitude
a myth beyond the lid of sky
that's been dropped on the airport.

--hans ostrom

London, 2023

A brisk but polite flow

of people on sidewalks, in cars.
Yelling and honking--rare.
Women everywhere, from
everywhere: how splendid.

A sturdiness of old kept-up
buildings--like thick, healthy
urban bones. Conversations
that include listening and evidence.
Reading, valued. Few symptoms
of sick rage. A relative

freedom from guns, which now
hold American well being hostage--
a pistol to the national head.
A certain lust for gardens
and the farms beyond. A troubling
dearth of birds. Except for

pigeons, who have become
full citizens (I love them). An
adequacy, at least, of bookstores.
Calm news-readers, free
from pressurized speech
and false drama. Loquacious
cab-drivers with comic schticks.

A healthy getting-on-with-it.

"Hello, Goodbye, Swindon"

Hello, Swindon, where one

train passenger gets off,
gray clouds let a shaft
of sunlight through, and aluminum
chairs are perforated like
sheets of postage stamps.

The detrained woman sits
in one of these, puts
an allergy sprayer in both
nostrils, combs her gray
hair, sighs, and waits.

How interesting it must be,
I think, to grow up and live
in Swindon--in any place
without famine, war, and other
acute violence. The train

keeps going through tunnels
of green trees and brush,
as if landscape were a private
matter. Breaks in the vegetative
wall show hedgerows
and pastures (the discipline
of farms). Guernsey cows

give green grass a close
reading. Sheep gather
in fluffy, passive gangs. Dark
green, black-branched
oaks give off a Druid vibe.
Goodbye, Swindon.

Crossing the Sierra Valley

Rolling through the scuffed

micro-towns of Vinton and Chilcoot,
we get to a panorama
of the Sierra Valley--biggest
high-altitude plain in these mountains.

Golden light that's slipped past
thunderheads makes the Valley
glow like a cathedral floor. Now
the thunderheads drape blue
curtains of showers on
surrounding mountains.

We'll cross the Valley, then
take the highway's snaking
curves up a thousand feet
to Yuba Pass & from there
weave down to where the giant
blue massif of rock, the Sierra
Buttes, presents itself &
when I see it, I get a home

feeling even though I haven't
lived there for decades. I'm glad,
so glad, to see pockets of snow
up there in August.

hans ostrom

New York

I lived in New York for two weeks
once. Doing some research in Harlem.
The apartment's sad kitchen
had been in New York quite
a while, had arrived full of
confidence. The cockroaches,
who made me pine for my college
studio hole, belonged to well known
New York cockroach families.
I could tell by the way they
carried themselves. Only years
later did it occur to me
that New York's intensity
must, to lonely people, become
a merciless cruelty.


hans ostrom

A Circus in Germany

A small Roma circus drags Evolution
to Bretzenheim, tacks up posters,
circles battered vans and trailers,
lets animals and children out to stretch.

A llama and two camels with flaccid humps
stand beneath a canopy, munching nothing,
about them the air of wisdom and dung.

A child rides a hippopotamus onto grass.
She looks like a wart on a planet.
The hippo becomes a gray boulder
upholstered in leather. Its teeth are
as big as my fist, its legs as long
as my fingers. How many million
years ago was it a slender fish?

Villagers cut through the park
to peer at the bestiary. a stinking
goat, smirking camels, and stunted
ponies. Children under the tiny
plastic Big Top can be heard
to scream with glee. In there
creatures and people jump through hoops.

hans ostrom
1981/20019

No Crisis, No Crescendo

On a night-train to Athens,
I met a woman from Gunnison,
Colorado.  She had blond hair
and seemed self-contained.
I could tell she traveled well.

Together we counted the stops
until the stop we wanted.
There'd been an earthquake.
Greeks out late at night had
much to say, much to smoke.

We walked to her hotel. She
kissed me thanks on my cheek.
Her perspiration smelled
sweetly metallic. I walked to my hotel,
knew no one in the city. An exhausted
desk-clerk looked like she hoped
I wasn't an overbearing American.

I complied. In the cheap room I
wanted to see the woman
from Colorado again and knew
I wouldn't. On with the flow.
These stories that aren't stories
are more important to me than
ones with crises or crescendi.
They are the life.


hans ostrom 2018

Lighting Out

I'm lighting out for infinity.  I don't
yet have a firm idea of when
I will arrive. Oh, everybody says
it's going to take me "forever."
The truth is they don't know.

Who could blame infinity
for getting sick of extending
itself, for stopping and settling
down?  I think on my way,
I'll come around a bend,

and there will be a town,
a scape of mirrors, towers,
boulevards, gardens with
gigantic butterflies and
multicolored trees.  It will

all have been designed by
close associates of time.
After I settle in, I'll
ask if anybody knows the street
on which I might find infinity.

Of course I'll try to reach
the residence by phone or signal
ahead of time.  Manners matter.
What sort of gift should I bring?
What sort of song should I sing?


hans ostrom 2017

"Amalfi," by Richard Aldington

"The Road to Avrillé," by Edna St. Vincent Millay

)

Two Travelers Meet Inside a Phrase-Book

“My name is Carmen,” she said.

     “The Post Office is over there,” he replied.

“Thank you!  It is one o’clock.”

      “Goodbye! How are you?”

“Do you speak English?”

     “The stranger is weeping.”

“My factory is on fire. No thank you.”

     “Excuse me!”

“That dog is frothing at the mouth.”

     “You’re welcome.”

“My passport lies under your thigh.”

     “Where is the hospital?”

“The train leaves in ten minutes.”

     “Please put this on.”

“Will the coup d’etat last all week?”

     “Yes, the museum is my cousin.”

—Hans Ostrom, 2012

In Vienna

/
/
/

In Vienna

How the fuck did I get here? I asked myself.
Winter. Yes, yes: the opera, the history,
the goddamned magnificence. A big so what?
to all of that and more when you're thin

on money, low on rest, and loaded down
with many mistakes you made. Back "home,"
they'd elected Reagan president. That, children,
was a point of no return. Austria is

of great historical importance. Okay, fine,
but I'm hungry, I thought. So I went out,
and I went out, and I found myself a cafe,
which featured a kind of importance I

required--hot food and wine, buzz of
customers, glowing lights and cigarette
smoke, a blond woman with a wry
smile, and a sense of proportion.


Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom