She Liked Inspector Maigret

 Elise Moeller Ostrom, 1927-2023

When her husband my uncle died,
I sent her a note and a mystery novel.
When next I saw her, she said,
"Thanks for your note and for not
sending me a goddamned book on grief."

She has just died, age 95, after decorously
drinking a lot of beer and devouring
crime novels for seven decades.
I never saw her not composed. She
saved that for privacy.

Her opinions firm as tungsten,
she voted liberal and pro-union
but wanted results, not fools
prattling ideology.

Her father was a football coach
and she married one, followed
fanatically the S.F. 49ers. Into old age,

she grew flowers, stacked her own
firewood, shoveled snow, and
fed migrating doves. We liked
each other a lot because, I think,
we liked words. Love? Grief?

Well, sure, but with restraint.

hans ostrom 2023

"Sinister Blue Vine," Roger Illsley

It's 1949 . . .

... and the rural mountain saloon's
full of cigarette smoke and men, maybe
a woman or two, though the word gal
is still in use. One man's missing
a leg up to the hip. Another's
almost blind: the war. No one
shares their most private thoughts--
of death, desire, fear, poverty.

Glasses of beer and whiskey
go to lips. It's an age of basic booze.
Smoke goes in and out of lungs,
spiders up to the stained wood ceiling.

The bartender, red-faced, washes
glasses, empties ash-trays, wipes
the dark varnished bar, counts back
coins stained with dirt and grease.

Already another war is coming. Like
waves, wars keep coming. The bosses
of history don't visit bars like this
or live in towns like this or work
with their hands. Calendars
and clocks trick the mind,
and it's almost dinner time.

hans ostrom 2023

Out of Our Way, Please

A small electric light behind me,

a merest proton echo of the sun--

and so my shadow leads me,

but I am in the way of where 

I ought to go, as I move down

a corridor at midnight, fretting. 

It's almost day now

and nearly when Earth spins

around to get out of its way,

and lets the Big Light bring

its rays to nourish everything

that grows and every mind that knows,

and every mind should want to know.

Oh, come now, all of us and everyone

with our tiny twisted prejudice, our petty

staggering away from proven ways to know,

our sad attachments to cold cadaverous

puppeteers: Let's at long last get

out of our own way. Let's not block

the light that lets us know that we

and every other human are essentially

the same on this our spinning planet. 

That we are "the people," and no other. 

hans ostrom

A Song For You - Willie Nelson, Ray Charles, Leon Russell

Pasquale Grasso - Solitude (Official Video) ft. Samara Joy

Blue Vine

 

Sinister blue vine

In the jungle of your mind

Reaching out to pull you in

Drag you down to blues again.

Sinister blue vine.

 

I am ashamed

To feel so bad

When life's all right

And things are fine.

 

Still sometimes sadness

Smothers me

Like a wicked jungle vine--

A sinister blue vine.

 

It grabs and grips you

On your path

And pulls you off

Your daily way.

 

It wraps you in

Its greasy branches

Sinks you, drowns you

In quicksand day.

 

Sinister blue vine

In the jungle of your mind

Reaching out to pull you in

Drag you down to blues again.

Sinister blue vine.

Grab a machete

Cut and slash

Rip away that awful vine

Find that path

Too feeling fine. 

Damn that sinister blue vine. 

hans ostrom 2023

The sound of Silence -The Ghost of Johnny Cash #johnnycash #SoundOfSile...

Think more rationally with Bayes’ rule | Steven Pinker

"Love is a Fire that Burns Unseen," by Luís Vaz de Camões

Not to Kill

 

The ageless human challenge still

Is will we ever find the will
not to kill? Not to kill.

hans ostrom 2023

The Cat and I Recover

Recovery requires a bit

more attention from my wife

than usual: 
the cat's suspicions
start to swell into resentment.

He just doesn't like me, anyway,
in spite of my efforts to become
staff-person of the year. Now this.

She sets the steaming cup beside me.
He stares at this unfolding outrage
from the back of the couch, sunlight
streaming in behind him haloing his fur.

"How are you?" I ask him.
He stares. Stares, not blinking.
"I didn't get brain surgery to spite you,"
I say, sipping Earl Grey cautiously.
He lowers his head onto his paws
and closes his eyes.

hans ostrom 2023

© Feb 27    cats • recovery • surgery • earl • grey

Dark Morning

In my old plaid flannel robe,

nose to cold window, I peek
out at the neighborhood, 4:40 a.m.,
which except for bulbous weak lights,
looks like a smudged sketch.

People's selves crawl through
the last of slumber toward waking
and working and waiting for life
to get better. The new mothers are up,
holding newborns close.

What odd, fragile creatures
we are, huddled behind and under
our wood and bricks, getting on
with our little lives--in spite

of competing catastrophes--
the worst maybe being this
wave of right-wing hysteria
bent on blasting the nation back
to 1860, smashing all the things
that have opened up society
in America. Hatreds turned
loose like rabid dogs. Science
and sanity out of fashion.

I shuffle toward a chair,

sit down, and wonder.