Fingernails

In adolescence, I bit my fingernails. Later I stopped. A carpenter's assistant for many summers, I performed the ritual of hitting my left thumb with a hammer, losing the nail--that black cloud of blood lying under there like a thunder-cloud. If memory serves, I didn't get my first professional manicure until after I was forty. I think I've probably gotten three more since then. In my figurative neck of the literal woods, a manicure for men was of course unheard of, and if it had been heard of, it would certainly have disrupted certain constructions of "manhood." Now, I gather, manicures for all manner of men are routine, and apparently wide-receivers in the National Football League are known to get manicures and pedicures--protecting the feet so the feet can get the body to where the pass needs to be caught by the hands, which make the money. When an old coach on television learned of this, he shook his head gravely. Another clear boundary of manhood erased! Football players going to a salon! Mercy!

Now I have a split thumbnail, and I gather it will be split for the duration. I have not heard of a way of inducing the split to heal itself. I blame the breakdown on too much yard-work.

In any event, I've clawed my way through several drafts of a fingernail poem, and here 'tis:

Fingernails

by Hans Ostrom

Neither bone nor skin nor food,
fingernails are tools we mouth,

deploy, and decorate. None
of us is ever so civilized—

whatever civilized means--
that we won’t, when

need be, start to claw,
scrape, dig—evolutionary

eons collapsing, leaving
residue of whole lost worlds

in our instinctual hands. Just
to scratch the scalp is such

a human gesture—and not; such
a basic lice-finding task—and not.

If your fingernails are soiled, they
file a report on your social status.

If they are manicured, they may
purr concerning leisure’s delicacy. If

bitten, they murmur of gnawing self-
doubt. If artificial—how fascinating.

I have heard that employees of alleged
civilized societies pull out fingernails

with pliers. This is torture: remember?
It is blood underneath human fingernails.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Tiny Doctors

My wife came up with the term "tiny doctors," but I can't remember how or when. She may have been thinking of Elton John's song, "Tiny Dancer," and misspoke, but in any event, the term has been a source of humor in our family for quite a while. I took its silliness and ran with it into a poem, which turned out to be something of a Twilight Zone episode in short-poem form:

Tiny Doctors

Tiny doctors come down the street.
Their tiny white coats flare in sunshine.

Our neighborhood’s an ailment
they’ve come to diagnose.

Run away, we say to the tiny doctors,
this place cannot be cured.

They do not listen. They are tiny
determined doctors. They’ve brought

their training with them. They
surround our symptoms. We

lock them up in basements,
one by one. Tiny doctors, so

surprised, very captive. We treat
them well but keep them, poor

tiny doctors, poor miniature,
misplaced physicians.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Colloquy With a Cat

Here is a less the buoyant but nonetheless amusing poem by Weldon Kees (1914-1955), musician and poet. It features a kind of conversation with a cat, a colloquy that allows the speaker to talk over some issues with himself, perhaps. (The poem appears elsewhere online, at poemhunter.com and bryantmcgill.com.)

Colloquy

by Weldon Kees

In the broken light, in owl weather, Webs on the lawn where the leaves end, I took the thin moon and the sky for cover To pick the cat's brains and descend A weedy hill. I found him groveling Inside the summerhouse, a shadowed bulge, Furred and somnolent.-"I bring," I said, "besides this dish of liver, and an edge Of cheese, the customary torments, And the usual wonder why we live At all, and why the world thins out and perishes As it has done for me, sieved As I am toward silences. Where Are we now? Do we know anything?" -Now, on another night, his look endures. "Give me the dish," he said. I had his answer, wise as yours.

More Poetic Math

Here's another poem on math, from a poet's perspective:

Doing Another Kind of Math

by Hans Ostrom

Bach over Blues
times Rock over
Mozart equals

music cubed.

Fox plus bear

divided by snow
equals dream.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Math and I

Mathematics and I were good friends up through geometry in high school. I'm not bad at arithmetic, I loved geometry (I think because I could visualize it), and I did fairly well at basic algebra. When I ran into trigonometry in high school, I had a bad teacher, but in truth, a good teacher would not have helped me much. It all seemed like gibberish to me, and I had this sneaking suspicion that "they" were simply making things up. None of the silly marks on the pages seemed to correspond to any world I knew. Of course, I was wrong. I was probably walking across bridges and riding in cars, the design of which had been affected by trigonometry.

Here is what one poet (me) does with math (the last line refers, rather too obviously, to one of my favorite poems, W.H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts," and there needs to be an accent over Musee, but I don't know how to make the blog-program cooperate):

Equation

by Hans Ostrom

Let mathematics represent mathematicians.
If algebra stands for their desire to operate
on the world from a goodly distance,
then geometry enacts a will to map turf,
stylize hearth, fortify cave, codify material
units. Arithmetic equals
greed, larceny, accumulation, gambling, and boredom
divided by

revenge, obligation, display, and patience.
Trigonometry cosignifies rational madness,
which can be expressed as
Icarus
leaving body, soil, pragmatism, and parentage
behind for rare atmosphere and rush
of Platonic calculation—his mind finally
off and liberated from short distances
between mediocre points within the Labyrinth,
itching for a hit of Apollonian insight, yearning
to glimpse God’s system of accounting tersely for
everything.

And let Daedalus occupy a point
on plain and solid ground, having already
calculated the rate of his son’s descent,
impact imposed by physical laws,
interval required to reach the body,
which will have, he reckons,
washed ashore right about . . . there.
About suffering, some Old Masters did the
math.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Road Not Taken--Misintepreted Instead

As my friend Bill, a scholar in political science but a fan of selected poetry, likes to note, Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" may well be the most widely misinterpreted and therefore misused poem in American literature. When people refer to the poem, they usually mean their reference to suggest that taking the road less traveled is a brave choice but a choice that is often rewarded. Taking that road is an admirable, independent thing to do, people imply, when they allude to Frost's poem.

The problem is that the poem doesn't, in fact, imply that sentiment. In fact, after the person "speaking" the poem has a look at the two roads, this is what he does and why he does it:

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.

Actually, then, both roads received about the same amount of traffic. One "wanted wear" just a bit more than the other, but "the passing there/Had worn them really about the same." Moreover, on that particular morning, "both . . . equally lay/In leaves no step had trodden black." So this "road less traveled" business is largely an illusion and vastly overemphasized in the "common wisdom" about the poem. One road was about as busy as the other, and let's face it: both were country roads, so we're not talking about an interstate highway vs. a country road.

More trouble for the common (mis)-interpretation occurs in the last stanza:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Notice that the speaker is projecting himself into old age, and he has decided ahead of time what his story will be when he gets that old. No matter what really happens between now (when he takes one road) and then (when he's old), he's going to claim that a) he took the one less traveled by, even though that will be an exaggeration and b) his taking this road "has made all the difference," even though he cannot yet know what effect taking that road will have on his life. Basically, the last stanza makes this a poem about how we fabricate our autobiographies. It's not really a poem about the virtues of taking the road less traveled. So all the high-school yearbooks that quote from the poem are quoting from it for the wrong reasons. But it doesn't matter because the accepted popular interpretation is "already on the books," and there's no way to correct it, except in this or that English class, which will have no effect on Received Opinion. Nonetheless: a tip of the cap to my friend Bill, who fights the good fight, not only with regard to this poem but in other matters connected to Received Opinion.

Oddly enough, I grew up "in a wood," near a place where two country roads diverged, so my reading of the poem was always colored by that fact. A provincial lad, I read the poem provincially (I think that's a tautology). I wrote a poem about that--my reading of the poem, not the tautology:

Two Roads Redux

Two roads diverged
in a wood. One had been named
Wild Plum Road and appeared
on U.S. Forest Service maps.
The other one was once called
the Old County Road, now just
the road, and did not appear on maps.

The unmapped road led to land
our father had built a house on when
to him the town of 200 seemed too
crowded—his words. We took the road
less traveled most of the time because
it led to and from our house.
We took Wild Plum Road
when we went fishing, or let hounds
go for a run, or cut firewood. We never

took it to go pick wild plums, which we

picked elsewhere: go figure. Who knows
what difference any of this has made?
I will say this: it was just like our father
to live on an unnamed, unimproved road.

When I first read Frost’s poem,
I figured the guy talking was local and took
both roads from time to time, and I wanted
to be told precisely where the roads led—
I mean, everybody in that town had to know.
That would have made all the difference
to me and ruined the poem for everyone else.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Poem: Psychic School

Here is another poem by Michelle Jones, a writer living in the Pacific Northwest:

Psychic School

by Michelle Jones

My mother is a psychic, or she wanted to be,
or maybe she just had this strange dream once.
In the barn, she burned her Ouiji board,
after she saw the ghost by the river.

My mother went to Colorado, and Virginia,
and after Nantucket, when she came back,
she raised a porcupine from the woods.
She predicted that porcupines have more lives than cats.

My mother also talks to her plants,
and her orchids are prettier than mine.
Love is memorizable, she says.

Once I saw my mother smashing dishes
in the garage. I thought it was a game
so I carried the broom like a champion,
and she laughed.

My mother tells me I’m going to marry a man
like my father.

She told me, he was better off dead once.

Later, she told me about the dogs in the kitchen,
with blood on the floor, quills on their tongues,
and my mother cried until the morning.

Copyright 2007 Michelle Jones

Among the many elements to like in this poem is the vivid ending. I have a similar memory from childhood, for my father always had three or four hunting-dogs, and they were almost never allowed in the house. But I do remember one hound having gotten into a scrape with a porcupine, and the dog had several quills in its mouth, so he was allowed inside for treatment. The quills are devilishly designed, amost like a fish-hook. We lived very far from the nearest veterinarian, so my father had to take the quills out himself. The best, perhaps only, way of getting some out was to pull them all the way through the skin, so of course there was a lot of blood, as in the ending of the poem. I also remember being astonished an how stoic the dog was.

List-Poem by the Numbers

The "list-poem" is one of the oldest modes of writing. Homer made long lists in his epics, for example, and I guess poets, being human (I'll assert this for the sake of argument), simply have that list-function in their brains, a function that Evolution must have selected early on. To Do: stay alive; find water; run from large predator.

Even if one doesn't end up writing a list-poem, listing is a heck of a way to prepare to write a poem. Such a preparation-list can be composed of images, associations that spring from a topic, phrases--almost anything, really. The title-poem of the late Wendy Bishop's book of poems, My Last Door, is a list poem, a catalog-poem, in which "Let my last door . . ." is repeated throughout the poem. So a list-poem can also develop into a kind of chanting-poem, incantatory.

Here's a short list-poem paying homage to the number 2:

Fortuitous Twos

by Hans Ostrom

A pair of spats. Two herons,
early morning, bending

necks to water. Windows
on each side of a carved door.

Cells dividing in a newborn baby.
A mother and a daughter

singing two-part harmony.
Two lovers waking up near

the ocean. Two moons circling
one planet. A couple of old men

golfing in a thunderstorm
two minutes before midnight.

Horns on a moonlit skull,
two miles from the water hole.

This first appeared in Wendy Bishop's textbook, 13 Ways of Looking for a Poem, still in print from Longman.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Homeless

Television-news told me today that almost 200,000 of the homeless citizens in the U.S. are veterans of the military. I think that approximately 25% of the homeless were in the military, whereas only about 14% of the population is composed of former military-veterans.

Almost all cities seem confused by "the homeless problem." When homeless persons establish encampments--under bridges, for example--cities ultimately disband them. But if the homeless congregate near businesses or homes, the police move them from there. Neighborhoods trying to improve themselves are not happy to see meal-distributors show up to feed the homeless because the homeless might bring other problems, like crime. A group for whom my wife and I make sandwiches ran into that problem; the police told them to stop distributing the sandwiches in a certain area of the city. The same goes for shelters: where should cities put them? Should there be shelters on military bases for veterans who are homeless?

The following poem is several years old and goes back to a period when many homeless persons were congregating in our city's main library:

Homeless Citizens in a Library

People have retreated
from the outside
of not having homes
to the inside of not
having homes. This
week that’s the public
library. Amongst books
and terminals, people
sit and lie, squat and
sleep. In bathroom stalls,
a few sell sex or chemicals.
Something needs to be
done about this problem.
Let’s run a keyword
search. Let’s look
for authors of this failure,
Let’s identify the complete
title of our responsibility.
Let’s use our library-cards
and borrow the brains, will,
and humanity to get these
people the help they need,
to get us
people the help we need.

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Poem About a Play

One great source of inspiration for writers is literature itself. Imitation of established works by newer writers was part of the writing-instruction created by the Roman, Quintilian, for example, some 2,000 years ago, and creative-writing teachers nowadays use the method, too. More often, perhaps, writers produce a work that expresses a response to reading they've done, or they use an existing work as a kind of rail on a pool-table, playing a "carom shot." The piece they write doesn't imitate the earlier work as it does play off it. In all of these practices, a productive tension exists between the old piece of literature and the new one, just as there is tension between a jazz-musician's rendering of a song and the song as it was strictly composed. The tension might also be regarded as a conversation. (Parody is a "conversation" in which one work mocks another.)

The following poem, by Meredith Ott, a writer in Oregon, was inspired by British writer Caryl Churchill's play about cloning, A Number:

A Number

by Meredith Ott

Me
well what do you mean by Me?
Am I myself because if there is another
I think I should know I think I should because because
I have a right to know because
if there are two three four or more
if there are eight me’s running around
shouldn’t I do I want to know
do I should I care and would they could they be like me
am I like me who am I like tell me, tell Me
I must be like someone
don’t we all come from somewhere some genetic make-up
some test tube of the mind of the body I don’t know
who I am is Me determined by someone else?

Could you tell me would you please
if you had the chance
or would you hide it from me?
if I commit a crime against myself do I commit it against others
who are me or are they me and do they feel it--
my suicide?
or are they satisfied
with life
life that has been chosen for them life that isn’t theirs for the choosing
or do they even notice
or know or care or stop to think or fear that maybe what they have isn’t theirs?
mine
could be
you made me. You made me…
they make me, made Me make them
can’t you stop it if you
don’t you want to have one
One perfect
what is it that you’re looking for?
have you found your one
have you found it in me in them
is it in me or from me
or is it
me
?
you
became the womb
you gave birth you gave me gave them gave you
you selfish
it was all for you I was
they were it was you
playing with god and science and where is my mother
the mother of all
I need to be nurtured to grow to develop
outside of a person sterile pure yet eternally contaminated
by the lack of self, family, being, purpose

raise me love me choose me
choose to choose me
aren’t I original only simple individual complicated complex
enough?
aren’t I enough Me?

Copyright 2007 by Meredith Ott

Invitation from a Poem

Often I enjoy reading poems that somehow invite the reader into them. Sometimes they do so merely by being accessible, but even difficult poems can signal, in a variety of ways, that the reader is still welcome. Many of Shakespeare's sonnets and Donne's poems belong, I'd argue, in the latter category. You know going in that there will be some knots to untie, but you also know you'll probably enjoy being inside the poem nonetheless. With some so-called L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poems, a few of Robert Creeley's poems, and a lot of Pound's poetry, I'm sometimes uncertain about how welcome I am in the poem.

Here's a poem that takes the idea of invitation both literally and figuratively:

Make Yourself, At Home

by Hans Ostrom

You are always welcome here
at the end of this sentence,
in a courtyard of expression.

Your presence shapes utterance,
organizes this garden of letters.
With your permission, afternoon

arrives. We could say “shadows
lengthen,” but that’s not very good,
and you prefer to think of Earth

always moving, pulling trees, people,
hills, and buildings toward and away
from sun. You are and change the subject.

You murmur a tale, which brings laughter
at its close. Will you tell that tale?
Please tell that tale again.

The invitation at the end is "spoken" by the one "uttering" the poem to an implied listener "within" the poem, but the invitation is also literal. The last stanza invites you to tell an engaging, perhaps humorous, tale or anecdote today to someone you know--or to a stranger, if the stranger will stand for it.

The poem is from Subjects Apprehended, by Hans Ostrom (Ohio: Pudding House Press, 2000).

Theme and Variations

I tried an experiment whereby I treated a poem the way a jazz musician might treat a melody, playing a melodic phrase or "theme" and then improvising upon the phrase. A couple circumstances suggested, even before I started, that the experiment might be less than 100% successful. I am a piano player, although piano hacker is more accurate. My mother (not a professional piano teacher) gave me a few lessons in middle-school, and then I taught myself, so I studied with the worst. I like to play ballads from the 30s and 40s, and I do a D+ version of "Satin Doll." Okay, maybe D (the grade, not the key). Second problem: words aren't musical notes. Third problem: it's the first time I've tried this. Fourth problem: nobody really likes experimental poems, even if they say they do. Looking on the bright side, I can observe that the poem really isn't very long. It stretches out a bit, but it doesn't have that many words. Here it is:

Theme And Variation

1. Theme

Be nice to her.
Nice words go far.
To go gracefully, gaze.
Her far gaze matters.

2. Variation

be
nice nice
to words to
her go go her
far gracefully far
gaze gaze
matters

3.Variation

her
to far
nice go gaze
be words gracefully matters
nice go gaze
to far
her

4. Variation

be
to
go

far
her

nice
gaze

words
matters

gracefully

Copyright Hans Ostrom 2007

Poem By Hiroshi Kashiwagi

Here is a spare, wry poem from a California writer named Hiroshi Kashiwagi:

A Librarian Looks at Snails

watching

snails

coupling

I wonder

if they read

books on

sexuality

Copyright 2007 Hiroshi Kashiwagi; used by permission.