Monday, February 4, 2013

"The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sacramento Capitol Mall



Politicos stride like totalitarian colonels.
Professionals lean into conversations
about cash-flow, internal control, and impact (a verb).

Winos stand against a wall and shiver
their way out of hallucination,
their shirt-fronts soaked with the Lamb's
most inexpensive blood; bums pick through rubbish
and sleep under news; the mad testify
to streetlights and themselves.

No one runs for office anymore
except the staffs of those who ran before.
They govern each other and whisper about us.

Sunlight remains democratic.
We walk in it together
between the muddy river and the capitol.
We are lobbyist and lunatic, accountant and pickpocket,
admin-assistant, tech-person, plumber,
and Ph.D. student writing about
power-relationships.

I find myself wondering not at all
about the powerful. I focus on a trembling hand
that picks through garbage. I fork over
a few bucks to the hand's person.
who gargles the words, "God bless you."
 Somewhere there’s a photo

of that man when he was six years old
and squinting at the camera, happy in a summer
in another state.

Maybe you finally come to hate poverty
enough to pursue it as an art;
maybe a thousand left hooks in the downtown gym
finally leave your brain fizzed like pink champagne,
and you're on the street mumbling to a corner man
who isn't there. Or somebody dies, and your way

of understanding that is to let go the things
that hint of looking forward,
including the grammar of love,
and love of self, and taking tomorrow straight.

Yeah, so, I gave him a few bucks, which will
go for booze, not a sandwich, and I don’t care
because it’s not my money anymore,
and as the Capitol might whisper,
it never was. 


Copyright 2013 hans ostrom

Friday, February 1, 2013

Twice-Believing Creatures



Twice-Believing Creatures


Crickets sing the word "ceasing" electronically
in dirt and dry stalks.
A heavy black beetle turns his belly
to the cosmos, plucks with his six feet
at the needles of a darkening pine bough.
The Magician dances out of straw. He is Dusk;
he juggles the sun and the moon and the evening star.

Here and there a few are alert,
some curious, some thankful--like the deer,
weary of swishing horseflies away
from their backsides all day and hungry
after the heavy afternoon;--like the raccoon,
waddling off to make a living at the pond's edge;
--and the tireless child, the old man
who stands near his garden listening to the corn grow,
and the woman with her hands folded,
singing out loud to nobody.

They know that dusk takes today's body
and brings another after an interlude of dreaming.
They know nothing of the sort;
they are as dubious as the light at dusk.
They know the world to be as new
as the note of a gnat in the ear, as old
as the lizard's dry smirk,
a boulder's personality, darkness.


Hans Ostrom, 2013

Monday, January 28, 2013

Nude Up and Get in a Pile

It may have been a line
from North Dallas Forty.
Anyway, we’d quote it
at the bar and laugh.
The thing is, pre-AIDS,
you might think you
were headed home
in a silver Camaro after
the bars closed
in California’s inimitable
Central Valley.  Then you might
stop at a red light, two lanes,
and two women you knew
barely might laugh, roll
down the window, and
suggest, “Follow us.”
And, wow, there you’d be,
nuded up and in, no,
not a pile, but an expansive
naked arrangement of
three or four or five.
It was a gas, a blast, a trip:
listen to the lingo change
down the ages. Olive oil
on large breasts, the
several positions, good
clean fun. Of course, in
an apartment of your brain,
you knew the party had
to end—that night; and for you;
and for a generation.  Microbes,
maturity, and so on. None-
the-less: at the stop-light,
in a Camaro, a little loaded
on whiskey and weed and
maybe a line: the light,
the spark, of mischief.
Good clean fun in
an era everybody and
his mother, as we said,
would not just forget but
not know existed.

*
*
hans ostrom 2013

"Everything Is Looted," by Anna Akhmatova