"Ghosts," by Elizabeth Jennings

Palms and Paws

He notes that lines cross his hands'

palms like broken hieroglyphs,
dried up canals, or lost roads
in a desert. Creases and carvings.
Clues of use. Scars. Upholstery
stiched after the fact. Sometimes,

he thinks, it's nice to hold a cat's
or dog's paw--those plump pads,
cushioning for leaps, lopes,
and sprints. Something sacred--
isn't there?--about palms and paws,
blooms on the stems of evolution,

epidermal note-paper, tiny
meadows of toil and calm.

hans ostrom 2024

Summer Theater

As a bulbous puce spider

sits still in its web waiting
for an insect to stick,
a butterfly bounds through
sunshine, alights to sip water
from a deep green wet leaf.

Bees maul lavendar blossoms.
An iridescent blue dragonfly
cruises by & a hummingbird
pulls up & parks mid-air
to sip nectar from a fire-red
crocosmia flower. Crows

sit on wires, roofs, and branches,
silently picking mites from feathers.
Summer theater, quite show--
I'm glad to see and know it.

hans ostrom 2024

Just Alive

It's midnight, you're standing in a room

looking out at darkness, you're
sipping water from a glass,
and you muse: If I weren't thinking
of me, no one in a world of 8 billion
would have me in mind. It's a

pleasant thought--to be on no one's
mind, as unremarkable (and unremarked)
as a weed in a meadow no one visits--
but alive! Just alive.

hans ostrom 2024

5ª SINFONIA / MAMBO Nº 5. Beethoven/Pérez Prado.

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River Rocks

 River rocks rolled,

current-rubbed, grit-buffed, &

for now in this garden

hans ostrom 2024

Brown Rabbit in a Meadow

 

Rabbit, still as stone.

in profile--one brown eye stares.

chewing jaws move, work.

hans ostrom 2024

In Times of Fire

I looked at photographs

of a California wildfire. One
showed remnants of a house--
scorched black beam lying
down. In the background,

black pine trunks stripped
of limbs. Foreground: ash
and a clothes dryer & a clothes
washer, side by side, leaning
on each other, their doors
melted off. They looked

back at me like vacant
eye sockets. In the past
they churned and spun
garments a family wore
as they laughed, ate,
quarreled, slept. In this

present, a cyclone of fire
struck them, vaporized
their dwelling. Now they
seem to gaze blindly
into a hellish future.

hans ostrom 2024

For One Night Only

I dreamed books,

the pulp and paper kind,

floated overhead like circling

birds. They

opened and words

tumbled out, came down

like dandelion seeds.

I grabbed what words

I could and put them

in a pail. At home

I dumped them

onto a table,

arranged them

into lists and phrases,

sentences, paragraphs . . . .

I cooked and ate, washed up,

spoke prayers into empty

silence, got in bead, read a book,

and fell asleep knowing I'd never

have the book-dream again. 

Hans Ostrom 2024

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