Reading/video of Auden's short reaction to the USSR's/Warsaw Pact's invasion of Czechoslovakia:
Thursday, January 7, 2021
Tuesday, January 5, 2021
Closing Time
tonight my cabaret of fears
glowed and hummed.
a band played anxiously in
sharp keys. the bartender
claimed not to have seen
Death around lately. but
she spoke she turned away
to polish a glass.
hans ostrom
circa 1994/2021
Pulp Mill, Commencement Bay
(
processes
night.
an
engineered
beast,
it never inhales.
its
smoke-steam is white
and
slow like dream clouds.
its
mansion of pipes
is lit
up like a festival.
the
mill manufactures
livings
and my sleep.
circa 2005/2021
hans ostrom
The Son She Never Had
The son she never had visits her
one night. He’s grown, a man
with stories to tell and scars,
big knuckles. At the table under
yellow light, she asks what it was
like to be a son without a mother.
“Oh, I had a mother,” he says.
The lines on his face are rivers
of her dreams. “She just wasn’t you.”
He takes her hand and leads her
past fact to worn brown carpet
of the “family” room. They dance.
She lays her head on his chest.
Above her is the ceiling where
her husband’s cigar-smoke settled.
Later they sit in the two big chairs.
“Do me a favor,” she asks, “and walk out
the door. I want to know
your manner of leaving.” He
obliges, a good son. Silence rushes back
into the house like winter air.
On the porch she tells herself
he would have had such knuckles
and danced with her that way.
He would have traveled far but come back.
In a factory he would have paused some
days in machinery roar and thought of her.
circa 1989/2021
The Leopard and the City
“A leopard shall watch over their cities.”
--Jeremiah 5:6
Rain fell out of the cloud of time.
It made no argument. Droplets
blotched a blond meadow. Out
of the pattern a leopard arose.
Its eyes reflected the cloud of time.
An old small city is my soul,
such as it is. The leopard watches
over it, her breathing and her heartbeat
syncopated. I do not visit there as often
as I should: Work is elsewhere
in factory-towns of will. When
the small city seems to call, I take
a road curved round a cliff. Up there
sits the leopard. The ledge is blue.
Arrived, I seek a sanguine plaza. People
I have tried to be loiter there. They slouch
and lean and gab. They know me well.
Out of the rain in a baked café,
we share a meal. We speak of the leopard,
become one person in the cloud of time.
hans ostrom circa 1990/2021
forgotten dream
you woke up
and the dream
floated out ofmind like pollen
patterns on a
spring stream
hans ostrom 2021
Spinoza
(Baruch de Spinoza, 1632-1677)
there in the Hague
Spinoza sat, grinding
lenses, making a living
from clarity.
Jews expelled him,
Christians menaced
him, just because
he wrote that
God was the sum
of all parts--the
only complete
being and the property
of no religion
but only of Godself.
it came as cold
news. worse,
it made
and makes
a certain amount
of sense.
Monday, January 4, 2021
"Smiling Poem"
Reading/video of some short light verse for a heavy wet day in the Pacific Northwest:
Cup
I am contained
in the cup of me
originally,
it's claimed, we came
from the sea.
actually,
what emerged were versions
of things that could
turn into us. nonetheless,
here I am, a full
cup of me,
a compound composed
of me, salt
water modified
elaborated, prorated,
not quite yet
evaporated;
self-contemplated.
Hiram Reports from His Adventure
In dark vegetation I couldn’t see
my body or hear thoughts. Fevers
rotted memory. Maggots flourished
and founded a parliament.
I hung in delirium, a sack
of neural bits and pieces. Birds in
endless green hooted, screamed.
I was transported to a desert that
cooked off confusion, revealing
basic elements of who allegedly
I’d been. My body became obvious
once more, eating dry food and
drinking wet water. I worked
in a factory of noon—my job to attach
objects to their shadows. Memories
arrived, stumbling like scattered
soldiers returning across sand,
descending from red rim-rock,
shedding uniforms, looking for
lovers and work.
Lost
don’t go by what I say
go by how the map reads
I must have lost our way
the map is where it leads
also, I’m not your guide
in fact I don’t know why
we’re walking side by side
or who let out that cry
Paying Respects
We found he iron garden-gate
linked to white pickets
hard and wondrous
to open. Ornamentation dated it.
Up the walkway then,
into her stifling house,
where she sat in her purple
dress and parchment skin,
saying what she thought
her whole life had taught
her. Almost too old to pity,
she was too austere to embrace.
The voice seemed to come
from years ago.
Our minds assured us
we would never grow
that weird if ever we
grew that old. Our minds
were confident we could
open the gate again, get
away. It stood out there
in advanced darkness. Inside,
the seconds of her clanking clock
ate the minutes of our patience.
Saturday, January 2, 2021
The Ride, the Badge
Tonight my memory is
a palomino exuberantly hooved
in an alpine meadow.
I ride the horse bareback
and fall off, replacing air
in lungs with fear,
pushing fear out then inhaling
again. I hold out
a sugar-cube on a flat palm
for my memory,
which nuzzles with a soft
gray mouth, nips
the cube, leaves lovely
equine slobber. The tail flicks out
at a fat fly, makes broom sounds.
Sunlight, the old sheriff, jumps
up on my memory,
and everything goes golden,
gathers
into a bright badge of
summer.
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