(reposting one from a while back)
Video: Song about Clarksdale, Mississippi, and the blues. Music composed by Billy B, song performed by Billy B. Lyrics by Hans Ostrom. Video by Dan Callnon.
Listen: sunrise stirs bugs
in dry grass. The long
whine of a steel guitar
curves into a thin blue highway.
This peace is easy to take, I'll tell you.
We kiss, kick off covers
light as dead butterflies,
and grab each other, laughing.
Your radio drops out a three-chord,
two-minute-fifty song,
too much like other songs,
just like those tin napkin
and sugar dispensers
that look alike always alike
on sticky plastic countertops
at all them truck strops,
where I’ll rest elbows,
the thick roar of sixteen
tires still in my ears. Darling,
if I chat up a waitress
while she's filling my
Thermos with coffee,
know it's only out of
habit and good manners.
You know my heart growls
like a diesel for you when
dawn spills across the hood
of the Peterbilt, and I think
ahead to gearing down on
the grade sloping into
your place here where
the creek sings out back.
circa 1987/2021
[revised]
Go on and cut the top off-a that mountain
to get your coal, Mr. High Pockets. You
can't cut that high-pitched wail out of the air
where the mountain was
and shall ever be, in God's eyes.
And all them strings get picked and strummed,
chorded and teased, til here comes a
tightly braided tune, careful and true,
like the long gray hair
of a matriarch reading her Bible in blue
moonlight, rocking and praying She's
as heart-broken and reconciled as a ballad
about some young'ns gone too soon. Music
of the hills distills sadness, strains it
through an upright tradition
that Nashville goddamn tried to ruin.
But could not. And will not.
Between Michigan and State,
she was caught without a coat
among wrought-iron intricacies
of histories. Her sheer blouse
panicked in cold air. She was
going somewhere. Her schedule
showed a route of escape. Not more
than a block from State
and Michigan, she again seized
a grip on fate, held on, got back
in the swing of the thing, yes,
back in the sway of her days.
hans ostrom circa 1990/2021
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
