this river swims in time. this sky
flies through emptiness. we live
forever every moment as love
falls into people. fuel
consumes
fire, and rain drinks Earth.
I saw
a thousand angels moving through
a silver valley. low
clouds
picked them up, changed them
into snow, conveyed them over
mountains, let them go. oh, let them go.
hans ostrom circa 1995/revised 2021
[second version]
[1860 HERSCHEL in Photogr. News 11 May 13 The possibility of taking a photograph, as it were by a snap-shotemof securing a picture in a tenth of a second of time.]
(Quoted from the Oxford English Dictionary online)
Snapshot
By any means, steal an image,
mark an instant's interplay between
light and facial shape. Shuffle it
off to memorabilia, through which
someone may rummage some day
not soon, in boxes or in Cloud.
Whoever it is will wonder
whose image got swiped
back here, where at the gathering
we think we know who's here, what
they're wearing, what they show. So
yes, of course, seize a sample
the flow, stabilize it in one of
the ways we know. Store it, for it
may be of interest one day, could be.
hans ostrom 2014/2021
[second version]
Each string ensemble player
leaned, turned, and swayed
in chairs differently as
they played. The women's
backs looked strong in gowns.
The men's feet in black shoes
stayed fixed to the floor.
Sometimes violin-bows poked
straight up as if reach for unseen
clouds just above the players'
heads. Portly cellos had to be
held up like friendly drunks.
They mumbled low genial
gratitude. One man stood
above the players, waving
his arms and a stick as if
to try to get someone's
attention. The violinists
may have glanced at him,
I don't know, but mostly
they cuddled their polished
wooden instruments, and
let their bodies feel the music,
and let us feel the vibrations
that they herded in the hall.
[second version]
the man wearing a thin sweatshirt
and no hat stands at an uncovered
bus stop in freezing rain. he isn't me.
he's trying to light a cigarette. his
attempt becomes a gesture--
ludicrous but noble, less than
tragic but not bad at all.
he's inside whatever being alive
is for him, and i'm inside what
being alive is to me. i see him
from a warm place out of the weather.
if i were like jesus i'd go to the
man and perform a miracle--
like getting that cigarette lit,
or giving him money,
or giving him my parka, or
embracing him. he might
like all of that. except for
the embrace. he might
bite my nose off for that.
i don't do any of these things,
because it's easier not to,
and it's acceptable that i
think i'm not his keeper.
at moments like these, i
think of Bukowski,
who--i gather from his
words, i never knew
the man--thought like
jesus sometimes, i mean
with a similar toughness.
tough on everybody--
including, let's say especially,
the reflective, ignoble fuckers in
warm parkas out of the
weather.
[second version]
This complex isn't simple: boxes
within boxes within boxes. Figures
stroll across a neon-glossy floor
toward dark caves, bathrooms, or
sugar and salt: they and I
are already dead--like people
photographed by cinema in 1939.
And we've been replaced by others
who move about here just as we do,
we did. Maybe one of them
is morbid, at least fatalistic,
and feels for a moment that time
has already departed, leaving
behind only ribbons of light
that spool images
flickering imperceptibly
on screens
and kernels of corn explode
into tiny thunderheads. Before
going into the movie, I think
this scene I've been in
may have been the better movie.
[second version]
They're pudgy, failed claws,
private nubs that often
go public. We encase them
like jewels, divas, or prisoners,
let them out for fresh air
only sometimes. The curling
of toes, one knows, is
a practice that migrated
from branched peoples
hanging around long ago.
When people say, "Kick up
your heels," they seem
to mean nothing.
Heel/toes, heel toes:
onward the masses walk hard
on hard urban surfaces.
It's the economy, stupid.
Our dogs is tired,
our gods are remote,
this is the greatest age
of toenail paint,
and I am the owner
of a hammer toe,
a hard name for a
soft undertow.
hans ostrom 2015/2021
(first posted January 27, 2017)
People we see once: flood of faces, coats,
collars--on avenues and plazas, in markets,
theatres, bars, banks, hospitals. A bent
shape hoeing weeds: one of us saw it once
one place from a train: This
is an example but only of itself. Its
singularity can’t be transposed. Imagine
you remember the person who interested you
terribly in that café that morning that city.
Sure it happened, but you don’t remember
because once was not enough. People we
see once compose our lives. Forgetting
them (we must), we lose wide arenas
of the lived. Even ghosts return, but not
the vast mass of once-only-noticed
who compose medium and matrix
of our one time here. We are adjacent and
circumstantial to strangers, one jostle
of flux away from knowing next to everything
about their lives. The river of moments takes
a different channel; the one moment becomes nothing now.
The once-only appear, then appear to go
to an Elsewhere that defines us. They go on
to get to know who they get to know.
Their lives are theoretically real to us, like
subatomic particles. To them their lives
are practically real to them. From their
view, ours are not. We know they were there,
vivid strangers, because they always are,
every day. Like a wreath floating
on the ocean, memory marks a space
abandoned. In large measure life is
recall of spaces occupied. History
consists of someone who insists on being
remembered, someone who insists on
remembering, combinations of both. Familiarity
and routine join to vie methodically; they
capture places in recall. Vivid strangers are
incidentally crucial, indigenous to a
present moment that is like a mist
over a meadow, rising, evaporating
just when we arrive, past as we are present.
