Poet's Musings

Saturday, July 15, 2023

Treat It

Forty

thousand people
in the U.S. get shot
per year. Guns, guns, guns.
Symptomatic, I think, of an awful
disease. Oh, treat
it, please.

Hans Ostrom 2023

The bass: like an agreeable, plump mayor
who understands the city of music
from the streets down. Or a geologist
who's studied the strata
below the tunes. A cool cat,
looking through sunglasses at a smoke-
clouded jazz bar, plucking thick strings
that seem to mutter to themselves
the words, "You have to understand,
yeah, you have to understand."

And the mayor stands aside,
lets the drums attack, the piano
scales rush and crash, the sax flash.
The mayor turns to the bassist
and says, "Oh, I understand,
brother, I understand."

hans ostrom 2023

Not a Waste

Thinking of Ann Marsh Monroe, 1956-2022

In a dark hall
of memory,
I see your face,
your lovely face.

In moonlight
of nostalgia,
I kiss your lips
and taste your taste.

I just heard you died.
Our love, long gone.
But no, that wild, weird
time was not a waste.

hans ostrom 2023

Mount Rainier

It doesn't take your breath away,

seeing the massive volcano-mountain,
which you think you're used to seeing
if you live here. Slate blue hide
slathered in creamy snow year-round.

A cone of stone dwarfing plain
and mountain range. Yes, a geologic
giant that rose from explosion, has
exploded, and will blow up again.

Seeing it makes you slow your breath--
you, who needs to breathe each moment.
The mountain breathes in millennia.
On its schedule, you're nothing. A

farmer in a valley near the mountain
told me his family was digging a well
in the silt-and-lava soil and hit the tops
of ancient fir trees the mountain
had obliterated with spewed lava.

Maybe you ride by the mountain
on a bus rolling on a highway.
There it is, casually surreal, just
too damned big. You're nothing
looking at something.

hans ostrom 2023

No, Not Yet

Of course I've talked

to people about you
and your death but
the only person I really
want to talk to is you.

This conversation
that cannot happen
perpetuates grief,
as a cold May keeps
Winter alive. That's

all right. I prefer
feeling the cold
and the ache of loss
to feeling nothing,
to "moving on," as they say.

I prefer not to surrender
in the face of life's and death's
obliteration of people.
No, not yet: I still want
to feel the loss of you.

hans ostrom 2023