Friday, April 14, 2017

University Beneath a Flight Plan

One of us speaks of photosynthesis, another
of White Supremacist terror in the U.S.,
another of Hamlet, Act III. Some students
listen.  Others talk.  Others dream.

Airplanes overhead interrupt with
sustained blasts of noise.  Bombers.
Transports. Fighters.  The sound of
jet engines is not a discussion.

Obedient brick buildings shudder.
Our words dissolve.  We keep trying
to teach and learn for a few seconds
and then give up.  Wait.

The pilots note the campus, a point
of reference.  They yawn. The
navigators are bored.  And
the bombardiers pretend.



hans ostrom 1984/2017

Twisted Words

You're twisting my words. Thank you--
it feels good. You spirally wrought
ragamuffin into finfumagar: well done.
It had contortion coming.

And look what you did to
chirioscuro.  It is unrecognizable.
Obviously, you are not new
to wrenching words.

If you don't mind, I'd
like to keep mademoiselle
as is, for as is it's perfect:
a sound sculpture.


hans ostrom 2017

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Expedition

Scrupulously planned
and with international sanction,
an expedition discovers itself
dying on ice.

The group walks now
only to look for places
where it can walk. Each
adventurer's blood flows
down through unfeeling toes
toward an alleged sea.

In unrelenting wind and white-out
roaring from imaginary North,
air and ice become one. So do
sky and landscape, person
and expedition.

Speech becomes something
dreamed remotely--like fingers
or the word, survival. All
vocabulary accumulates
into a glacial prayer too
immense to bring out of the heart.



hans ostrom 2017


Monday, April 10, 2017

The Old Highway in Context

Well, I'll tell you, before the freeway
was there, there was the Old Highway.
Before that the old path was there, when
they used wagons. Before that,

Muhammad received Allah's words
and said, yes he said, and before
that, Adam and Eve were still around,
and before that, an asteroid

with water on it hit the Earth,
and before that the Earth and Moon
were the same ball.  Hell, I must've
drive that Old Highway a million times.


hans ostrom 2017

Friday, April 7, 2017

April: Suspect the River

It's not all poppies and blossoms. Death
knows the way to April, too. Colts die.
Arctic becomes wanton one last time.
A spouse leaves a spouse forever,
children go to war, and war goes to children.

No one will guarantee you won't die
in this naive month that smiles
between melancholy March and ruddy
May. Yes, you may do something insane,
such as long for bitter, brief, honest

December days. Or find birds bothersome,
hysterical. Sunlight isn't always easy.
The bright duty of flowers may wear on you.
I advise caution. Look at hills carefully.
Order more seeds than necessary, cash

on delivery.  And suspect the rising river.


hans ostrom 1987/2017

Wednesday, April 5, 2017

Hanging Out with William Blake

It's possible to explain William Blake's writing.
I'm guilty of it myself.  I danced
with Tiriel in an article.  In  a refereed journal,
baby! I also convened with Blakeans
in Santa Cruz: ecstatic dancers, emergent
recluses, titans from research
universities,  Hippie refugees, Santa
Cruzeans, iconographers, and just
plain folks. Nothing against

Blakeans, but it seems more productive
to partake of Blake's texts
as if they formed a surreal festival.
Enjoy the music (I stole this idea
from A.E. Housman.) Put on a
costume yourself. Move into, with,
and against the crowd. In

the parlance of the Beats
(which they ripped off from
African Americans), Blake
is to be dug/not dug. Interpretation
and belief remain secondary.
Call the first if you think you
need it.  Avoid the second.


hans ostrom 2017

Lord of the Clouds

I am the Lord of the Clouds.
The low clouds.  Fog, really.
I am the Lord of the Fog!
Well, maybe more like  a minor swamp god.
However, I have aspirations
to rise from being a sentry for stagnant water.


hans ostrom 2017

Monday, March 27, 2017

Unfinished Reading

Books you don't finish reading
are like mountains you don't
finish climbing or comparisons
like this that don't seem quite right.

They are like acquaintances who
don't become friends. (This seems
better.) You have been told or
think you see what's up ahead,
but a weariness sets in. Let

the book be great for others,
you think.  Just leave me out of it. 
I've resigned from the reading of
The Fairie Queen, Clarissa, The
Castle of Crossed Destinies, 
The Charterhouse at Parma, 
countless portly mystery novels.
I pretended to finish Paradise
Lost but, as with the film,
The Titanic, I had guessed the ending.

I forced myself to climb Mann's
Magic Mountain. It took
decades, and it wasn't worth it.

When Sam Johnson (who
said of Paradise Lost, "No one
wished it longer") got tired
of a book, he threw it across
the room. Bolder than I,
he didn't resign from reading.
He fired the book.


hans ostrom 2017

Transformation: Military; or, As You Were

The Colonel said to the Corporal,
"As you were." The corporal
obeyed and turned back into
a mountain goat from Western
North America. In his mind,

the colonel saw the youthful
goat gamboling down and up
jagged bluffs.  "I shall miss him,"
said the colonel to himself--
"such a nimble fellow, and
that odd laugh!"



hans ostrom 2017

Prism Time

Having been convicted
by light, I was sentenced
to prism. A three-year
stretch in spectral stir,
just trying to survive
in fractured colors
and rainbowed lock-up.
It made me a cold,
hard, hallucinatory man.
Prism changes you.



hans ostrom 2017

Our Task

Working in heat
mean enough
to make grass snarl
and boulders ring,
I sometimes
imagined I could not
go on. Ridiculous:

I was as far from
the tortuous labor
slaves endured
for centuries as
I was from Neptune.

Their agony is
immured, is of
the bricks forming
the foundation
of this White Supremacist
monolith now adorned
at the top by
a bloated, cadaverous
cad, multiply evil.

Our task is
to wear down
White Supremacy
and wash away
the dust and grit
the project leaves,
please.



hans ostrom 2017

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Kiruna: New Year's Eve

(December 1980)

At noon there was a murky soup of light,
which darkness drank.

Iron miners cruise in large
awkward old American cars
on Kiruna's frozen streets.
The custom is for each drunk
passenger to pay a driver
to be not drunk.

Samis sell bone-handled knives
and jewelry the color of
salmon eggs.

At the New Year's party, my Swedish
cousin and I watch shadows and smudges
of the original King Kong play
on a Finnish TV station. My cousin
is blonder than Fay Wray.

Fireworks outside seem stupid because
we didn't have to wait for darkness.
At 11:00 p.m. my cousin reports
that she always cries at the stroke
of the New Year. I'm prepared,
like a Swede, when tears travel
from her eyes like small droplets
of Sami pewter.  I'm impressed

when one tear lands in her
glass of Norwegian champagne.



1981/2017 Hans Ostrom

Return to Uncleton

Return to Uncleton


His uncle had named the town Uncleton,
served as mayor for fifty years.

Except to tidy up the dog’s grave,
he goes back only for the annual

Rust Festival. He owns snapshots
of the Rust Queens and their Oxidized Courts

from the last twenty years. The lake looks
different from before and smells.

His trousers slip off his buttocks,
and teenagers laugh, their goddamned

music thumping out of cars. He’s inherited
just a pinch of his uncle’s rage

but no property. The sun off the lake
makes him scowl. Where exactly is

the dog’s grave? He remembers how,
just a pup, the little bastard nipped him.

Uncleton, O Uncleton, I hate the way you
draw me back like english on a cue ball.



Copyright 2007/2017

The Semicolon in Modern Thought

The Semicolon in Modern Thought

Scholars disagree; they are disagreeable.
According to Jeb Nolocimis, Distinguished
Three-Legged Chair in Social Podiatry at
Bandsaw University, a hallucinating German
printer presided over the marriage of Period
and Comma in his shop, located in
Mainz-am-Rhein, circa 1498. However,
Dr. Lola Doirep of the Toots Institute
rejects Nolocimis's account as "surreal
historicism." She argues periodically
that the semicolon should be interpreted
semiotically first as inhabiting a liminal
zone vexed by indecision (stop or continue?)
and second as the right and left eyes
of an iconic emoticon, which more deeply
represents "winking post-modernity"
and "the rise of Cyber-cute." Meanwhile,
Argentinian-American poet Rexi Vivaldo,
in his long poem, "Stubby's Quest,"
alludes to the semicolon as "a sad
period's single tear, frozen in time
and space--a lament
for the mortality of clauses . . . ;"





Copyright 2008/2017 Hans Ostrom

Sunday, March 19, 2017

And the Feelings Thus Conjured

She's dipping her hands in the paint
that neuron networks manufacture.
She's rising from sleep and adorning
the darkness with bright looping
smears her fingertips eject.

The fog shows up, a loose collection
of gray blobs held inside a pale
amorphous balloon. There is a sound
of grinding, a sound of grinding,
a grinding, a sound. She says to no one,

"Sing with me: 'I am stuck on 
the balcony of REM sleep . . .!'"
We don't have to call it anything, you
know. We can just experience it
and the feelings thus conjured,

and live an entire lifetime
there in a mind-sponsored moment.


hans ostrom 2017

The Bees Are Baking

Bees inside my head wear gold aprons
because they're baking tiny tan cookies.
Of course they buzz.  It's how they talk.
They're speaking of their relationship
to time, of how they've been bees
again and again through the ages.

I ask them a question.  Horrified,
they vanish, leaving only the pollen
of their buzzing.  Oh, well.  Their
little bee kitchen smells warm.
I put all of their cookies, which taste
of you-guessed-it, on my tongue at
once because I'm suddenly quite hungry.


hans ostrom 2017

Friday, March 10, 2017

The Ladder People

Inside birch cones
live ladder people.

They build tiny
fires and carry

hand-made ladders
to cliffs, perching

there for nights
and days, singing

to each other,
letting blue moths

alight on their hands.
These people of

the birch cones
decorate their ladders

and themselves with
paint and bits of string.

Comes a light rain.
The ladder people descend.

Comes a stiff breeze,
and birch limbs toss.

Comes regret, comes
to us, and with it

arrives a deep wish to
hear the ladder people sing.



hans ostrom 2017

Underwater History

for Don Parkerson

They're there, our oceanic blunders.
Monitor and Merrimack. Spanish galleons.
And our depravities: slave ships.

Submarines like the Thrusher
could not cope with fathoms.

Weed and coral enhance remaining
shapes. A crucifix grows ocean hair.
A doubloon swells into a rock,
and a captain's iced skull lectures to
a school of fish. Diving down,

the historian cannot afford to haul
a text. Theories don't hold oxygen. He
monitors (and merrimacks) his every
breath like a meditating monk.

What comes clear in obscure depths
is the sluggishness of history,
the persistence with which events
get devoured: how a ship only gradually
slips off the reef to ultimate depths;
how accoutrements of empire
dissolve like common soda.

Floating there, the burden of breath
on his back in steel tanks, the historian
sees small sharks swim through
portholes of a destroyer.  The broadsides
of history went unheard here. Ocean,
imbued with oblivion's appetite,
accepted all defeated ships,
all wars and atrocities, settled or not.


hans ostrom 2017

The Revision

It's the end of the semester. The last essay is due
to me, professor. He, student, misses the final class
and struggles to my office afterwards. He stands
in the doorway, exhausted, and tells me his dream:

"Somehow you'd gotten hold of my essay
before I wanted to turn it in. You assigned
it a grade of the square-root of A. Your
only comment was Very suburban. Then I
stole back the essay before you had
recorded the grade.  I put an A in
the online grading system, next to my name,
and then I watched as the essay
revised itself, prose metamorphosis."

"I'll be darned," I say.  He gives me
the essay.  I look at it.  "Well," I say,
"you'd better put your name on it"



hans ostrom 2017

Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Dilapidated

The syllables of this word seem
about to come undone.  Anyway,
dilapidated is best if you don't
have to live in it.  Sauntering
around the Sierra Nevada,
I liked seeing shacks that
had stopped lying to themselves.
They spoke highly of the failed,
exhausted miners who'd lived
in them. Weirder were

the cars that people had driven
or pushed into the manzanita brush.
Rust munches them even now.
Yes, and the quiet old imbibers
sitting at the Buckhorn bar,
weary feet in weary shoes
touching brass. These old folks
sipped from a shot glass; and waited.
And today I feel dilapidated.



hans ostrom 2017