Temporary

If you're a poet or a visual artist, maybe you can relate to this micro-issue I've been having (and it's not the issue of having adopted the idiom, "to have issues")--namely, that I've had the image of a barge on a river stuck in my mind. That's all. Just a barge on a river--preferably on a river at night, but not necessarily. And preferably a barge that's just drifting. I saw many barges on the Rhine, decades ago, and I saw some on the Mississippi once, and I see barges and tankers in the Pacific Northwest, but all of this experience doesn't explain why the image is stuck in my mind like lint in a dryer-screen. I like that metaphor for my mind: empty, full of hot air. Apt.

I mean, it's not like this image has some overwhelming import to it--like the image of the mountain in Close Encounters or the image of the moth-man in The Moth-Man Chronicles.
What's more, or what's less, this image of the barge is demotic at best. My sense is that barges aren't regarded as glamorous or even mysterious.

Anyway, attempting to have done with the image, I tried to put it in different poems, including this one. If you're stuck with an image, I hope it's a better one than a barge, and I have faith that you can do more with your image than I've with mine.



To a Temporary One

Ah, temporary one, why do you
fret so? Why don't you let it all
go like a barge adrift on a smelly
river? Temporary one, what
do you imagine you can stop
or start in your short time
and with your granules of power?

You ride atop a transitory train.
There's no point in yelling
at the city you pass by, asking
why the city doesn't do things
differently. Get off that train.
Forget that barge. Leave

all that complicated freight
to someone else. Yo, temporary
one: Live it out as best you can,
leave it at that, as it leaves you.


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Flooded Farm

When I was on the train yesterday and, to a lesser extent, when I was in my car (eyes on the road), I noticed just how much farm land gets flooded, not just when river-banks won't hold the rivers but when the ground itself simply gets saturated. Obviously, much farmland is also lowland, so it makes sense that much farmland would be vulnerable to flooding. Nonetheless, the flooding of one's farm has to register way past disappointing, even if you understand the nature of low-lying land, and the work required after the water has withdrawn must seem overwhelming.

(For the short term, if you live in Western Washington or live elsewhere and want to send a dollar or two, Associated Ministries in Tacoma is coordinating many relief-efforts for flooding in general--not just for farmers. And then of course there's also the local Red Cross chapters.)

For the longer term, I wondered to what extent state and federal government entities and/or non-governmental entities take care to preserve farmland, much of which has been paved over or built upon. Even in this post-modern age, we do need things to eat, people to grow them, and land to grow them on/in.

I did discover the American Farmland Trust online: http://www.farmland.org/, and I want to learn more about its work. It looks like among their work is the preservation of farmland, not dissimilar to the way the Nature Conservancy simply (or not so simply) buys land to make sure no one develops it. That direct approach appeals to me.


Flooded Farm


When water won't stop rising, when
it rises efficiently, without violence,
and inundates your farm, wrecking
field, barn, equipment, feed; when
it fills up your house and hosts boats
sent to rescue you, you let yourself
loathe the recklessness of nature,
its ruinous spasms, which knock
farm-accounts off-balance and load
your plans with mud. Oh, you'll be back--

to clean up after flood, to stand and stare
in the silted living-room, to get children
and animals resettled. The struggle's
both a losing and continuous one.
But in this flooded moment, the engine
of the rescue-boat belches blue smoke.
Your grandfather, who started the farm,
had it much worse: that's a statement
you've learned to recite automatically.
It doesn't require belief.


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Glimpses of Towns

(image: a piece of a road-map of Sweden, including
Söderfors)






My goodness, Washington (the state) is flooding. The combination of much recent snow in the high country plus what we call "The Pineapple Exress"--lots and lots of warm rain from the Pacific--have made many rivers burst. The nearby town of Orting is in danger of going under water. It also has the dubious honor of being in the path of a major lava-flow, should Mt. Rainier decide to wake up. Fire and rain, indeed.

Of course, I picked this day to ride the train north to Bellingham, pick up a car, and drive it back. Things went fine, although even Interstate 5 was covered with water in places, and there were menacing signs about side-highways being closed.

I stopped in the small town of Darrington to get a bite to eat--and thought of Richard Hugo, who dearly loved to visit the small towns of Washington and Montana and write poems about them--well, not really about them so much as about the responses they generated in him. In The Triggering Town, Hugo advises not knowing too much about the towns. He encouraged poets to make all sorts of (unfounded) assumptions. So if I were following his advice, I would assume that the waitress who served me food came in second in the homecoming-queen contest.

Many moons ago, in Sweden, I stopped briefly in Söderfors, Sweden, a former steel and manufacturing town (no doubt some things are still manufactured there), and based strictly on a few observations and a lot of impressions, I wrote a "triggering-town" poem. As both a reader and a writer, one must assess such poems as poems, not as journalistic reports--unless of course the poem really does present itself as an historical poem--and then a different set of legitimate criteria come into play. I remember that a municipal clock wasn't keeping the right time--a charming detail, as far as I was concerned. I remember being exceedingly fascinated by the color of bricks used in many buildings in the town: black. Perhaps the clay used to make the bricks was full of iron or another kind of mineral/metal. . . . On the train-ride today, I saw some "violent brown-black water" rushing off hillsides and out of culverts. . . .

. . .And here's hoping the rivers in Western Washington crest soon and recede quickly, as I post the Söderfors poem:

Söderfors, Sweden


Brown mortar, black bricks, buildings
from industry’s youth.

Two girls walk along a narrow
sandy path over the dam. Violent brown-black
water rushes through
the spillway. A sign cautions.

A gull nests in a granite slab.
(Incubation is a branch of geology.)

Reach for the black bricks—
to know them. Their texture is glass.
They were cooked to the point
at which manufacturing gives way

to beautiful compounds. Söderfors
is a silent town. Its cast-iron clock
is ornate and wrong. Bright green,

nearly lime: that used to be the color
of a rusting Saab parked all by itself.


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

North Yuba River

North Yuba River


We swam in this snow-cold alpine river,
looked at trout through SCUBA masks,
picked up perwiinkles, which sheathed
themselves in tiny tubular mosaics
they made from grains of gravel.

The river was cold enough to make bones
ache. The sun was hot enough to make us
want to go back in the river again. We were
young and quick and facing upstream like
trout. Now we're not young, we're slow,

and you couldn't get us to go into such a
river without a push or a pull.
Our focus is downstream, where
the river falls away or takes a bend
into the blue canyon.


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Side Effects

I'm a big fan of medicine, especially when it works, but even when it works because of the placebo effect. Yes, I know that global pharmaceutical companies make profits that, by most reasonable measures, are excessive, and that not enough people have access to medicine. Probably there are more than a few medicines out there that are more commercial than necessary, too. Nonetheless, think of all the afflictions people don't suffer from, or suffer much less from, than before, owing to medicine.

At the same time, the warnings about side-effects that accompany medicine, at least in the U.S., have become farcical. The legal-departments of pharmaceutical companies must interface, as they say, quite a bit with the public relations departments and the hired advert. agencies.


Side-Effects


Discontinue taking this medicine if your hair
turns into snakes. If you experience an erection
lasting four hours or more, then we must assume
that, for better or worse, you have a penis;
anyway, attach a small flag to the erection
and declare yourself emperor. If, after
taking this medicine, you start swallowing
pebbles, it probably has nothing to do
with the medicine. Other side-effects
may include spending too much money
on this medicine, the desire to organize
parades, death, twice the number of toes
you now have, a craving for goats' hooves
pickled in brine, and a heart-rhythm
that sounds like the samba. If you experience

a sudden drop in self-esteem, expect
your doctor to hang up when you call,
assuming you can find a doctor. If
you actually took this medicine,
then it's already too late, and an aged,
unbathed shaman will be escorting you
to another zone of time and space--
not necessarily forever; don't over-react.

As with all medicines, keep this one
beyond the reach of lemurs and hippopotami.
If you have any questions, write them out
on a piece of paper and eat the paper.
We're a pharmaceutical conglomerate.
We're not your friend. What
is it with you people, anyway?


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Employee

(image: Art Carney in character as Ed Norton,
NYC sewer-worker. I have a poster of the image
on my office-wall, and occasionally I point to it
and identify Ed as the editor of the Norton
anthologies of literature, which are most popular in college
English classes)



Employee


No matter how long, how well,
you work for us, you're only
as good as your health is today.

We're not sorry to say
that to us what we pay
you is overhead.

Yes, your record is good,
but alas, it describes a past
from which we've made a

profit already. We're a
forward-looking company,
as we mention in our

annual report. Yes,
experience counts,
but our calculations

show inexperience to be
cheaper. Thanks. We hope
you've set a little something

aside. Our size is downed.
Your time is up. We wish you
luck (one more lie for old time's sake).


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

In the Midst of the Military

For a variety of geographical, geological, historical, and cultural reasons, the Tacoma/Seattle metropolitan area is by no means a boring place to live. Just the presence of Mount Rainier is a startling fact of landscape. A longtime friend of mine from Germany, a German professor of American Studies, visited once and has not been able to get the image of the mountain out of his head since. In a letter once he wrote, "Always before me I see the image of The Mountain!" The Alps are nothing to sneeze at; in fact, they reminded me of a cross between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada. They have the mass of the former but also the dramatic vertical angles of the latter. But a napping volcano like Rainier is a geological entity unto itself. When the mountain is out, it looks like a surreal virtual image attached to the background of Tacoma. It's out of proportion.

This area also happens to be saturated by the presence of the U.S. armed forces. Military aircraft routinely fly low over the campus at which I teach. I think they probably use the campus as a landmark for landing at either McChord Air Force Base or the Fort Lewis Army Post. Also, the Boeing aircraft corporation has plants in (actually near) Seattle and in Everett, to the north.

Military Tacoma Complex

To the north lie nuclear submarines,
black bulbous tubes packed with missiles.
To the south sprawl an air-force base
and an army post. I wonder what Jesus
would say about these weapons--and
not a few preachers excited by war.
Maybe Jesus would put them all
on Caesar's side of the ledger,
rendered. That's just a guess.

Presuming to speak for Jesus or
assuming one knows what God thinks:
errors. Still the fire-power
held in this region exceeds imagination,
turns the term "fire-power" into
a particle of dust, and chills the spirit.

Proliferation of atomic weapons: error.

Millenia of military-inventions
are a first-stone's throw away
from a patch of grass I stare at.
Three crows walk across the grass.
Battalions . . . tanks . . . fighter-planes . . .
itinerant, weary military families . . . bombs,
rockets, missiles . . . atomic warheads.
Right here, right close, nearby. The crows
lift off heavily, flap toward conifers.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

The nuclear-submarine base to the north of Tacoma/Seattle is called Bangor. The submarines are called Tridents, and I found a fact-sheet about them online. Here's just a snippet from the fact-sheet (which appear on the www.gzcenter.org site):

Number of Trident submarines in U.S. fleet = 18

Number of Trident missiles per Trident sub = 24

Number of nuclear warheads per Trident missile = 8

Total number of warheads currently deployed on U.S. Trident fleet = 3,456

MMMM
Percentage of total U.S. nuclear warheads deployed on Trident fleet = 48%

Number of kilotons on one Trident W76 warhead = 100

Number of kilotons on one Trident W88 warhead = 475

Number of W88 warheads deployed on Trident fleet = 384

Total number of kilotons deployed on Trident fleet = 489,600

Number of kilotons on atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima = 14

Food, Gas, and the Oxford Comma

We drove one of our aged Volvos to Bellingham yesterday so that our trusted mechanic could work on it. Bellingham's 90 miles north of Seattle, which is about 50 miles north of where we live, so you can see how eccentric our auto-mechanic arrangements are. After we drop off the car, we take Amtrak home. Amtrak's arrangements can be eccentric, too, however. From Bellingham, one takes an Amtrak bus to Seattle, and then one may take either the Sounder, a local commuter train, or the Cascade, which goes all the way to Portland. Why Amtrak is unable to schedule a regular train from Bellingham to Seattle remains a mystery, at least to me.

On the way, I saw a sign that read as follows:

FOOD-GAS
LODGING
NEXT EXIT

I think the choice to put a hyphen between FOOD and GAS was ill-advised because doing so makes "food" function as an adjective modifying "gas." Consequently, the sign informed me that methane gas in some form (one doesn't want to spend too much time reflecting on the subject) was available by means of the next exit.

If I were in charge of writing such signs, I probably would have written "Food, Gasoline, and Lodging: Next Exit," but more letters and punctuation translate into a bigger sign and greater expense. I understand. Still, I prefer the series of three, with the comma before the "and"--a comma known in some circles as the Oxford comma because it is favored, I assume, by many British writers and editors.

For about three years (quite some time ago), I wrote a books-column every two weeks for a local metropolitan daily. The copy I wrote was apparently fairly "clean" because the copy-editors rarely edited it significantly, although of course the headline-writer also gave the column its title. After I'd been writing the column for about a year, however, a copy-editor called me and said, "Look, in almost every column of yours, you use the Oxford comma, and I take it out, so how about you stop using it?" He was pretty ticked off. I don't blame him. I should have been more sensitive to the fact that the AP Style Manual does not recommend using the Oxford comma. I agreed that, from that point forward, I'd leave the Oxford comma out of the columns I wrote.

On occasion, the absence of that comma may cause some confusion, but that's pretty rare. I think I just like the symmetry and tidiness of the comma: X [comma] Y [comma] and Z [period].
Probably we shall never see the following road-sign:

FOOD, GAS, LODGING, AND THE OXFORD COMMA: NEXT EXIT.

Happy New Year From Emily and Elvis

Karl Shapiro published an essay called "The Career of the Poem." I haven't read it in ages, but I recall that, in part, it continues his genial quarrel with T.S. Eliot's poetry. Mainly, however, I remember having been mystified by the title and having thought, "How can a poem have a career?"

Probably the only poem of mine to have a "career" is "Emily Dickinson and Elvis Presley in Heaven." By "career," I mean the poem seems to have gone on a journey of its own and to signify a wide spectrum of things to a variety of readers. It's a modest journey, to be sure; the poem is hardly famous. But for reasons I can only guess, people often respond to the poem favorably. Editors have asked to reprint the poem a few times, and (here's a scary thought), I think the poem may have ended up in some collection that's used in a few Advanced Placement English classes in high schools. The poem also gets posted on blogs from time to time. And a collage-artist named Deb Richardson constructed the collage, based on the poem, that appears above. Thanks again to her.

My ambition for the poem was simple: I wanted to publish it at least once. That was achieved in the late 1980s, in a magazine called The Sucharnochee Review. ("I'm Sucharnochee. Who are you? Are you Sucharnochee, too?") From there the poem seemed to manage its own odd wee career, without a manager, an agent, or an entourage.

So here's the poem again, this time functioning as an indirect Happy New Year from Emily and Elvis to poets, poems, blog-posters, rockers, listeners, and readers here, there, and everywhere. After the poem appears a short form of its resume, which reflects its career, which (oh, my) is in its second decade now.

Emily Dickinson and Elvis Presley in Heaven


They call each other `E.' Elvis picks
wildflowers near the river and brings
them to Emily. She explains half-rhymes to him.

In heaven Emily wears her hair long, sports
Levis and western blouses with rhinestones.
Elvis is lean again, wears baggy trousers

and T-shirts, a letterman's jacket from Tupelo High.
They take long walks and often hold hands.
She prefers they remain just friends. Forever.

Emily's poems now contain naugahyde, Cadillacs,
Electricity, jets, TV, Little Richard and Richard
Nixon. The rock-a-billy rhythm makes her smile.

Elvis likes himself with style. This afternoon
he will play guitar and sing "I Taste A Liquor
Never Brewed" to the tune of "Love Me Tender."

Emily will clap and harmonize. Alone
in their cabins later, they'll listen to the river
and nap. They will not think of Amherst

or Las Vegas. They know why God made them
roommates. It's because America
was their hometown. It's because

God is a thing without
feathers. It's because
God wears blue suede shoes.



By Hans Ostrom, The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006 (Indianapolis: Dog Ear Publishing, 2006). Published previously in the Sucarnochee Review, The Washington Post Book World (“Poet’s Choice” column by Rita Dove), 13 Ways of Looking For a Poem, by Wendy Bishop (Longman), and Kiss Off: Poems to Set You Free (Warner Books). Copyright Hans Ostrom.

Entrepreneur

According to a Web site called theholidayspot, here is how one says Happy New Year in Afghanistan:

Saale nao mubbarak.

In Persia--such as Iran:

Sale-e no mobarak.

In India, where Hindi is spoken:

Naye Varsha Ki Shubhkanyen.

I hope this site is sufficiently trustworthy that I haven't written something like "please chew on a pebble," or worse. If I've misplaced my trust, I apologize.

Happy New Year in Swedish is as follows: Glad nytt år. So "year" in Swedish sounds like "oar" in English. That's what that little circle does to the pronunciation of the a.

In Italian, HNY is buono anno nouvo, I think.

In French: Bonne annee.

Which brings me, because I wanted it to do so, to the word entrepreneur, which springs from the French verb entreprendere, at least according to the OED online. And that verb means "to undertake [something]," but not, I presume, in the sense of what an undertaker does, although of course one could undertake mortuary-work and thereby undertake undertaking and be an entrepreneur.

It is a wee bit ironic that one of American capitalists' favorite words is French, partly because American/French relations have always been composed of "love/hate," but also because Americans tend to think of entrepreneurship as so essentially "American." Further, after France did not fully support the U.S. invasion of Iraq, rightward-leaning American folk became most incensed; you remember the silly "freedom fries" episode in the political spectacle back then.

I remember the comedian Dennis Miller's sounding off at the time. (At some point, Miller decided his views were mostly in line with those of George W. Bush, and he even has a gig on Fox News now, where he seems uneasy.) He said that because of France's absence of support for the invasion, "France is dead to me." I found that statement pretty amusing even though he did not intend as a joke. Of course, it seems to be borrowed from gangster lingo, but for one citizen of a country to say that a whole nation is dead to him or her may reflect an overly expansive view of that citizen's power. I don't think France is worried about "being dead" to one one American comedian with a spotty but extremely entrepreneurial resume. Imagine an American's response to learning that a French mime considered the USA "dead to me."

Oddly enough, "entrepreneur" in English originally referred to someone who organized musical events. That is, it seems to have been limited to "show business." In this sense, one of the earliest references is from 1828, in England. But by 1852, the word in English meant pretty much what it means now. It is always of interest (to me) when a language and/or a culture seems to "need" a word from a different language to fill some kind of perceived hole in the native language. Such is the case with "ombudsperson," for example--a Swedish word, one of the very few imported directly into English.

In business-like fashion, I've attempted to write a poem concerning this word, entrepreneur. I'm afraid I have been too business-like with regard to the title.


Entrepreneur

Think of this poem as a new business.
Welcome! How may I help you?
We're running a special sale
on images, including a blackened
big toe, the variegated fur of a
domestic cat, and a freckle
on a woman's lower back. Will
that be cash or credit?

Alas, this business fails
to turn a profit. Isn't that
just like poetry? --Always
thinking of itself and not
the bottom line. What

was Andrew Carnegie's
favorite poem? . . . Oh, dear:
Thugs sent by this poem's
venture-capital investors
have arrived. They want
their money back, plus
the vig. We must escape.
We'll meet up later in a bar.

A bar. Now there's a real
business: exchanging vessels
of distilled and brewed liquids
for cash, listening to failed
entrepreneurs--and poets
of every kind--tell their
tales of woe, wiping the dark
wooden bar clean. "Last call!"


Hans Ostrom Copyright 1008 Hans Ostrom

Top Secret

(image of Spy vs. Spy, from Mad Magazine)





Top Secret


How does a secret reach the top?
Also--the top of what? I think
of secrets that never reach the peak.
They remain in huts on a slope,
run out of provisions, succumb
to despair and gravity, and stumble
toward a village of common knowledge
where they are nobody special.

What percentage of secrets deemed
Top should a government share
with everyone? Answer: always
a greater percentage than the
government claims. Incidentally,
who manufactures the stamps
that spell TOP SECRET? Is
this information secret?

I might have made a semi-
excellent spy because I tend
to forget secrets people tell me.
The safest place to keep a secret
is one you can't find again. If
someone needs the secret,
the situation may seem awkward.

I know there are good reasons
to keep secrets, but not as many
as the bad reasons. Information
isn't power. Power is Power. It
keeps secrets chiefly because
It can. Because It will. Sometimes

when I stood next to an alpine
creek, fast water would arrange
itself just so, so it became like
a liquid lens with no distortion.
The complex beauty of the creek's
multicolored, gravelly basis, with
bits of debris and a trout's dark
back, struck apprehension clearly.
Transparency's a transfusion.


Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Bats and Bobs in My Belfry

I'm not exactly sure why, but in Winter, the reading I do that's not connected with my professorial work tends to include either Russian novels or classic detective fiction or both. With regard to Russian novels, I guess one reason may be obvious: who "does" Winter better in fiction that the Russians? With regard to detective fiction, well, I can remember having read the collected Sherlock Holmes tales for the first time in the winter, and I even remember reading them by candle-light when the power went out for a few days. So maybe that experience welded Winter to the reading of detective fiction, in my case.

So I've dipped into War and Peace for the umpteenth time, and I've decided to read Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels again; in fact, I'm reading a couple of them for the first time. I'd read Strong Poison and Whose Body? before, for example, but I'm reading The Nine Tailors for the first time. (The photo is of Sayers.)

It has nothing to do with tailors, at least as referring to people who put clothes together. It has everything to do with bells. Church bells. Ringing church bells--the tradition and practice of which are bewilderingly complex--and fascinating. In the beginning of the novel (I'm not spoiling the plot), Lord Peter is pressed into service as a parish church literally rings in the New Year--with 8 bell-ringers ringing a bell each for nine hours, from midnight to 9:00 a.m. That's some serious bell-ringing. The narrator also lets us know that one of the bells was forged in the ground; that is, a hollowed out piece of pasture was used to mold the bell, back in the day.

There are probably cultures that immerse themselves in arcane, eccentric practices more fully (one wants to say more madly) that the Brits, but I can't think of any at the moment. (And for every arcane pursuit, there seems to be a BBC radio show.) Apparently, serious bell-ringing began in the 17th century, and soon ringers were performing elaborate, mathematically complex tunes, although I thing I'm supposed to use "change" in place of "tune." Soon thereafter, an elaborate and seemingly impenetrable vocabulary emerged. For instance, "tailors" is, according to the OED online, a corruption of "tellers," which probably is related to "tolling." According to a bell-ringing glossary online, "bob" refers to "a type of plain method" of ringing in which a "lead or a half-lead" is deployed. All righteee, then.

I know I'm over my head with a subject when the definitions of terms seem as confusing as the terms they allegedly define. It was that way with trigonometry.

In bell-ringing circles (that word seems apt, given how sound radiates), "wrong" doesn't mean incorrect. It is "a device that causes an odd number of bells (often 3) to vary their work"--usually related to the "Treble's full lead." There, now; we've cleared that up!

Sayers was not just a Brit, but also a Dante scholar, a devout Christian, and a feminist. This combination helps to make her a most readable detective novelist, full of surprises, knowledge, wisdom, and wit. I wouldn't say her villains are especially interesting, but her detective, Wimsey, is distinctive enough to rival Holmes, and his side-kick (and wife), Harriet Vane, a liberated woman of the 1920s, more than rivals Watson, except for the fact that Watson is our narrator in the tales, and for the fact that Harriet is not in all the novels.

The devout-Christian part induces Sayers to defend ferociously the practice of bell-ringing--in an author's note before the novel begins. She asks, rhetorically, why anyone would complain about bell-ringing in an age of the automobile and the "wails" of jazz--especially when bell-ringing is a tribute to God. The novel itself makes bell-ringing--like book-collecting, fly-fishing, and all manner of pursuits--and end in itself. Highly proscribed subcultures like this no doubt provide great comfort to people in a bewildering, chaotic world. Meanwhile, ordinary folks who aren't maniacally devoted to such a pursuit think the bell-ringers, et al., have "bats in their belfry." I always thought that was a charming term for insanity. I heard it quite a bit when I was growing up (not always directed at me, I hasten to add), but I don't hear or read it anymore.

In any event, here I am in Winter's darkness, immersed in a Sayers book and immersed in her immersion in bell-ringing. And this pleases me? Yes, I'm afraid it does. I'm 40 pages in, and there's yet to be a murder, so I must be pleased. I usually like at least one murder--or some other serious crime--to occur within the first 25 pages of detective novels.

So when you ring in the New Year, think of . . . Dorothy Sayers, Lord Peter Wimsey, bats in the belfry, and bob, who is not only your uncle but also "a type of plain method . . .".

If there's a bat or two in your belfry and you'd like to know more about this obscure art of bell-ringing, well, here's a link:

http://www.cccbr.org.uk/ringing/ringing.php

Winter-Mix

The lingo of those who report weather-news to us fascinates, although it may fascinate less when we're focused on the news itself and how it might disrupt our lives.

A term new to me is "winter mix," which I feel obligated to hyphenate because winter is a noun pressed into service as an adjective. At any rate, it apparently refers that anything-can-happen weather, when rain, snow, freezing rain, or just cold air may greet you when you step outside. There is a note of resignation in this term that appeals to me, as if, subtextually, the weather-person were saying, "You know what? It's winter, and the weather's unpleasant, so sue me." Ellen DeGeneres has a nice bit about how people tend to blame weather-reporters for the weather-news, an attitude sometimes enacted clumsily on the set of local-TV news-shows, where news "anchors" display mock outrage toward their climatological colleagues. "Please tell us the snow is going to stop, Amanda!"

Still, "weather-mix" doesn't measure up to my favorite term, used almost exclusively in the Pacific Northwest, as far as I can tell: "sun breaks," which also should be hyphenated, in my opinion. Essentially, the terms means "cloudy," and everybody knows that, in some circumstances, sunlight may break through clouds momentarily. But saying "there will be sun-breaks" instead of saying "it's going to be cloudy again" may qualify as protesting too much. I hope the "financial" reporters don't start saying, "The economic outlook is still horrible--but with prosperity-breaks in the afternoon, followed by a few minutes of economic justice overnight."

So anyway, I decided to play around with a poem concerning this winter-mix business.


Winter's Mixed Results

Snow to rain and back to snow
again. Then comes just cold,
which freezes slush and snow
and mud. At last we're slowed
down and up, our feet and wheels
and winged chariots set back
to sluggish paces, in some cases
even stopped by frozen slop
of slush and snow and mud.

This weather lurks beneath
the mean temperature. We're
put in a mercury-mood--heavy,
gray, not quite solid, depressed
by cold. After thaw, abrasive
rains scour streets. Hard wind
mutters under eaves, in
gaps between urban structures.
We escape again into feverish
bustling and maniacal toil, into
the flow of routine we hold dear.


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom