Thursday, January 20, 2011
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Just Ray
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)
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We'd Say That's Just Ray
He built up a furniture-store in Sacramento,
made enough to have a summer Sierra home.
This was back when families owned such stores,
before meta-corporations rolled over them
with container-shipments, volume, capital, etc.
Ray's employees embezzled. The business
collapsed. A proud man defeated. Nobody
doesn't lose. We're told differently ("you can
be whatever you want") because it's good for
business. Yep, Ray was his name. A good man
as far as we could tell, our ages ranging from 6 to
15. We had to furnish a tree fort, and one of us,
not me, put a garter snake down Ray's daughter's
shirt one summer when she was climbing up.
Laurel was her name. Tough. She told her
mother to shut up. This was before the thieves
wrecked Ray. If he were alive today,
he'd say something sober and true about success.
We'd probably humor him and say, after he'd left,
"Oh, that's just Ray."
Copyright 2011 Ostrom
)
(
)
We'd Say That's Just Ray
He built up a furniture-store in Sacramento,
made enough to have a summer Sierra home.
This was back when families owned such stores,
before meta-corporations rolled over them
with container-shipments, volume, capital, etc.
Ray's employees embezzled. The business
collapsed. A proud man defeated. Nobody
doesn't lose. We're told differently ("you can
be whatever you want") because it's good for
business. Yep, Ray was his name. A good man
as far as we could tell, our ages ranging from 6 to
15. We had to furnish a tree fort, and one of us,
not me, put a garter snake down Ray's daughter's
shirt one summer when she was climbing up.
Laurel was her name. Tough. She told her
mother to shut up. This was before the thieves
wrecked Ray. If he were alive today,
he'd say something sober and true about success.
We'd probably humor him and say, after he'd left,
"Oh, that's just Ray."
Copyright 2011 Ostrom
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Monday, January 17, 2011
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgments in books are a genre unto itself, with sub-genres like the academic-book kind, the poetry-boo kind, even the textbook kind. Some are a bit grudging, as if the author hates thanking anybody. Some are expansive, even excessive--the author as darned excited. You can bet that the spouse and the agent (if the author has either or both) get thanked.
Anyway, I decided to play around with this in a poem.
Acknowledgements
First, I must express my gratitude
to Ladislaw Kruplizard for allowing me
to borrow his twenty-volume treatise
on Viking axes. Elliot Logbottom, Ezra
Liverdust, Diana Glutenate, and Myron
Timitomi all glanced at drafts of the manuscript
and rolled their eyes. I thank them, and I have
a long memory. Mao Lee Williams, Fidel
Du Pont, and Tami Bumble let me camp
in their backyards and fight raccoons
for garbage. No, really; thanks. To
the janitor at the Newton Figg Libary of
Fascinating Items, my thanks for letting
me in the back way, and mum's the word.
Finally, there are no words to express
adequate gratitude to my former wife,
Lady Esther Feastfoot, whose lawyers
destroyed my lawyers, thereby leaving
me with little to do but write this book.
Esther, the libel laws are on my side.
Anyway, I decided to play around with this in a poem.
Acknowledgements
First, I must express my gratitude
to Ladislaw Kruplizard for allowing me
to borrow his twenty-volume treatise
on Viking axes. Elliot Logbottom, Ezra
Liverdust, Diana Glutenate, and Myron
Timitomi all glanced at drafts of the manuscript
and rolled their eyes. I thank them, and I have
a long memory. Mao Lee Williams, Fidel
Du Pont, and Tami Bumble let me camp
in their backyards and fight raccoons
for garbage. No, really; thanks. To
the janitor at the Newton Figg Libary of
Fascinating Items, my thanks for letting
me in the back way, and mum's the word.
Finally, there are no words to express
adequate gratitude to my former wife,
Lady Esther Feastfoot, whose lawyers
destroyed my lawyers, thereby leaving
me with little to do but write this book.
Esther, the libel laws are on my side.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Memory's Bus
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Memory's Bus
Memory is madness
that's deemed sane.
It hums lost tunes and
strolls a lost lane.
It makes things up
and calls them "Past."
It manufactures
replicas that last.
For language and math,
memory's all right.
It helps you hold what
you read last night.
Its versions of us, though,
become who we are.
Arbitrarily, it selects
scenes that will star.
In the story of us, memory
tells and retells us.
Memory drives the
weirdest tour-bus.
Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom
@
@
@
Memory's Bus
Memory is madness
that's deemed sane.
It hums lost tunes and
strolls a lost lane.
It makes things up
and calls them "Past."
It manufactures
replicas that last.
For language and math,
memory's all right.
It helps you hold what
you read last night.
Its versions of us, though,
become who we are.
Arbitrarily, it selects
scenes that will star.
In the story of us, memory
tells and retells us.
Memory drives the
weirdest tour-bus.
Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom
Earth As Art
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*
*
*
Earth As Art
In aircraft over Eastern Oregon, see winter's
landscape white and blue. White discs equal
crop fields: wheat? Lake-blue equals not
lake but mountains' shadows: shockingly
beautiful and surreal. Brownish blue is lake.
All color down there just is: is simply it.
Allow color to be abstract if you will.
White ends abruptly as a suede plain
opens up to view. Plain cannot desire
view, unlike artists and their art. This
sculpted painting below comes from
genius of, genesis of, Earth. Down there,
as up here where jet-trails briefly mark
the sky, humans have etched geometric
shapes and scrawled highways. That's
about all. Otherwise, Earth is left
alone to the studio of itself.
Copyright 2011
*
*
*
Earth As Art
In aircraft over Eastern Oregon, see winter's
landscape white and blue. White discs equal
crop fields: wheat? Lake-blue equals not
lake but mountains' shadows: shockingly
beautiful and surreal. Brownish blue is lake.
All color down there just is: is simply it.
Allow color to be abstract if you will.
White ends abruptly as a suede plain
opens up to view. Plain cannot desire
view, unlike artists and their art. This
sculpted painting below comes from
genius of, genesis of, Earth. Down there,
as up here where jet-trails briefly mark
the sky, humans have etched geometric
shapes and scrawled highways. That's
about all. Otherwise, Earth is left
alone to the studio of itself.
Copyright 2011
Selected, Screened, Scanned
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**
***
****
Selected, Screened, Scanned
In Vegas airport, I was selected for extra
security-screening, or netted in the screen
for securely extraordinary surveillance. I felt
like an unusual combination of numbers
that had arisen against common gaming odds.
"We want nothing in your pockets but air,"
said the woman. (The same philosophy
guides the gaming industry, which doesn't
gamble.) She then left me standing like a
mannequin in the scanner's glass exhibit,
my shoeless feet set in someone's yellow
footprints. A device rotated around
axis-me, dusting me with radiation, my
hands up and elbows out like those of
a salamander climbing a clammy stone.
I emerged with nothing in my pockets
but air and a few sad items in my
hands, such as a handkerchief and
scraps of poems. A man greeted me
severely when I came out from the
momentary cell. He examined stuff
in my hands. He spoke into a walkie-
talkie: "Copy the male," he said to . . .
someone, somewhere, who had placed
a kind of bet on me. Why?
Was it my dark and brooding brow,
my atavistic 50s buzz-cut, my constant
befuddlement as, in line, I moved bits
of paper, coins, lint, and pens from pocket
pocket to pocket like a Dickensian
fidgeter? What raised the odds on me,
aside from my oddity? Ah, it could have
been my gaze, which, fascinated, fastens
itself on persons, all of whom interest me.
To stare, after all, is part of a writer's
routine. In front of a screen, the
surveilling man or woman either was or
was not relieved to lose the wager placed
on the male, the me-male, the I, the copied
male, the selected, suspected, screened,
scanned, and surveilled male with only
air in his pockets, socks on his feet,
and curiosity in his head.
Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom
**
***
****
Selected, Screened, Scanned
In Vegas airport, I was selected for extra
security-screening, or netted in the screen
for securely extraordinary surveillance. I felt
like an unusual combination of numbers
that had arisen against common gaming odds.
"We want nothing in your pockets but air,"
said the woman. (The same philosophy
guides the gaming industry, which doesn't
gamble.) She then left me standing like a
mannequin in the scanner's glass exhibit,
my shoeless feet set in someone's yellow
footprints. A device rotated around
axis-me, dusting me with radiation, my
hands up and elbows out like those of
a salamander climbing a clammy stone.
I emerged with nothing in my pockets
but air and a few sad items in my
hands, such as a handkerchief and
scraps of poems. A man greeted me
severely when I came out from the
momentary cell. He examined stuff
in my hands. He spoke into a walkie-
talkie: "Copy the male," he said to . . .
someone, somewhere, who had placed
a kind of bet on me. Why?
Was it my dark and brooding brow,
my atavistic 50s buzz-cut, my constant
befuddlement as, in line, I moved bits
of paper, coins, lint, and pens from pocket
pocket to pocket like a Dickensian
fidgeter? What raised the odds on me,
aside from my oddity? Ah, it could have
been my gaze, which, fascinated, fastens
itself on persons, all of whom interest me.
To stare, after all, is part of a writer's
routine. In front of a screen, the
surveilling man or woman either was or
was not relieved to lose the wager placed
on the male, the me-male, the I, the copied
male, the selected, suspected, screened,
scanned, and surveilled male with only
air in his pockets, socks on his feet,
and curiosity in his head.
Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom
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