Roof

Mist has found its night-air.
From the buzz of the plane,
we know the plane flies
circularly in clouds. Have one!
A neighbor cries, followed by
I need new strings. We are
on the roof but no closer to the sky,
buzzing toward a circular high.

Phrasing Today

How shall we phrase this day?
It has its own rhetoric.
Our arguments are largely choral
and decorative. Vowels

of sunlight stream between
consonantal trees and bathe
guttural buildings. Sky is a blue
theme; air, a forum.



hans ostrom 2015

The Post and the Cinema

I grew up fond of the post,
its letters and envelopes,
typed script and cursive,
stamps and addresses.
Its pace of weeks and days,
years and months.
Its slow magic. Now
it labors, a harried
beast with no charm
and many enemies.
I'm used to its
alleged replacements,
but once I loved the post.

I used to fall into cinema
as if it were a liquid dream,
a pool of better reality.
Now I see through it to
the cynicism, the
racism and capital,
bad writing, bad acting,
no acting, no point.
Hollywood's a sewage-
processing plant by another
name. I like some films
all right. But I used
to love the cinema.

It's another thing
to watch, is all,
institutions altered,
dead, or dying,
drifting by like dirigibles.



hans ostrom 2015

"Early One Morning," by Edward Thomas

They Will

They will photograph themselves holding guns.
They will incorporate the national flag
into their wardrobe.
They will proclaim their faith aggressively.
They will act in contradiction to their faith.
They will not read history.
They will not read literature.
They will not consult data.
They will reject conclusions from science.
They will demand to be considered special
and may link themselves to God.

They will not understand.
They will not try to understand.
They will be tyrants in their families.
They will perceive no contradictions.
They will recoil from wit and irony.
They will mimic gestures of status.
They will threaten.
They will be particularly susceptible
to fascist appeals.
They will transmit ignorance gleefully.
They will not know how to ask good questions.
They will remain enraged by complexity
and change.
They will not change.


hans ostrom 2015

Hollywood's Not Doing it For Me

I was watching a digitalized video
of a film in which immensely wealthy
celebrities with slight builds
(made more slight by Hollywood's
emaciation-demands) were pretending
on a sound stage to be tough cowboys
or gangsters or spies or cops. It wasn't
working for me. Their acting

couldn't overcome the built-in
farce of the system that made
the product--the insincere,
serious, transparently cynical,
ghastly moving-picture factory.

I turned off the machine.

I imagined the two men
having to work a shift
building a house. That scene
worked for me. I imagined
them quitting after ten
minutes and hobbling
toward the limousine.

After that scene stopped
in my head, I went outside
and dug a hole to plant
a green-gauge plum tree in.
I was entertained.



hans ostrom 2015

The Great Photon River

I wonder about the number of electrons
in me. I know you wonder the same
about the number in you. I wonder about
their origin. And I wonder about photons:
fiat photons. Sometimes, ego

forgets to block out all transmissions
from the broader spectrum,
in which instants
you may glimpse,
I can too,

the scene that shows it's all,
including here and us, one river
of light flowing around
and through black-hole boulders
and dark-matter mountains.



hans ostrom 2015

Note to Hart Crane

"For unless poetry can absorb the machine...then poetry has failed of its full contemporary function."

--Hart Crane



As I started typing this wad of words, sir,
I received a note from "my" machine:
Your html cannot be accepted.

Afraid or not, I am
sure the machine has absorbed us.
Ever adaptable (I type this
as if I mean it), we write
from and about the technological
innards, but we be the absorbee.

Rather than building bridges,
the culture seems merely
to have outsmarted itself
in ways even a good advertising
man like yourself couldn't
have seen coming. It produces
catastrophe in a businesslike manner,
very professional.

Atlantis is a casino
and a resort, Plato
was a fascist, and the Brooklyn Bridge is
quaint, and . . . .

. . .And everything, is the problem.
Anyway, from inside, unlyrically,
some craft reports like this
about the lovely contours of the machine,
the words floating like plastic trash
on the surface of "our" seminal html. May
a brother buy a vowel? Machine says no.

hans ostrom 2015

Synesthesia

Oh, the brain is such
a busy beast, operating
on its own, only oh occasionally
letting will pretend it is a manager.

On its own, the beast
associates the Thursday word
with an aubergine purple
and velvet texture.

It links Saturday
to red, Sunday to hard
translucence, Monday to off-white
or beige, Tuesday

to blue and an upholstered feel,
Wednesday to tan and cinnamon,
a graininess. Friday: black and gray,
the vintage whimsy of

a checkerboard linoleum floor.
Brain, to what end, this
communication between strangers
in the internal jazz cafe?


hans ostrom 2015

Crow Knows Chronos

How does a crow
know when to slow
down as it flies
toward ragged-tipped trees
near Pacific?
You tell me.

And tell me this, your Majesty:
How does the eye
know when to spy
crows as they slow-
ly approach that tree,
ragged-topped next to coast?

Will you science me
when you tell me
why brain, which
is eye, which is crow,
knows crow, ocean,
and differences between?
Why brain indeed knows,
why cerebral deeds seem sane
when nothing would make
less science

to the unaccustomed crow
than eye and ragged
tree-top, ocean and black
ragged crow-wing brain?
Oh, you tell me,
oh, talk to me

using available light
and good godawful language
which crow's caw & ocean's
elasticity can soon articulate.
You science me, fathom
depths and chart crow-flight,
you all, you You, you too, O crOw.






hans ostrom 2015


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What I Miss About Sweden

Jag saknar Sverige. Have I
sentimentalized that long country?
To be sure. Still there's much
to miss specifically. How
Swedes listen and have known
silence to be a key component
of conversation. How
they're suspicious of people
who require attention and thus
of Americans. The ubiquitous

(or so it seems) aromas
of coffee and pastry and certain
spices. Small grocery stores
that sell small potatoes still
with dried mud on them. The

presence of the absence of war.
A multitude of drolleries.
Crunch of tires and boots
on snow. Bicycles through snow.
The practical national enthusiasm
for children as a protected class.

Group-thinking (but not group-
thought). The way the language
swings--no wonder that the Swedes
loved Duke Ellington. Certain shades

of yellow on large public buildings,
and of red on cottages. Order,
without mania. How light
is a Norse god. Pop music. Jazz,
blues. Cucumber sandwiches.
Herring, herring everywhere.
And the news, which is, as it
should be, presented with
suspicion and perplexity.

hans ostrom 2015

Pluto, Yes

I wonder what day it is
on Pluto. Maybe
the Plutonians have named
a blues song after the day
of the week (or corresponding
unit) that's notoriously grim,
even for a disrespected orb
barely on speaking therms
with the sun. And

everybody knows that the
Plutonian work-day is forever,
longest in the solar system,
plus no labor unions. Cold.

I say, Hey, Pluto, I'll check
with you again when it's about
noon your time, Okay, man?


hans ostrom 2015

Experimental Vulgarity

Experimental. Ex-
paramilitary. Osprey,
men, tall: say it fast.

...I meant all. Expired.
Ax-pyred. Rapier wit:
annoying as hell. Expert

in metal. What does the
experiment entail? Experimental,
imperimental. Ahem:

empirical is no miracle,
but still it can be lyrical.
Free radicals are costly;

you'll want them surveilled
and unveiled; ultimately
intimately impaled. Mostly I wanted

to question the planted
evidence by means of
experimentation, to

curate with large vulgarity
disinterested respectability,
which has always been my enemy.

Adieu! Whew! Boastily and
brashily, I wanted a clashingly
jellied up bit of jazz

so as to pazz the evening.

hans ostrom 2015