Top Chef

Before I post a poem, here's some this-and-that:

The Lewin Group, which the GOPers and unctuous Charles Gibson (ABC) cite when discussing health-care "reform," is owned by United Health Care, a large insurance corporation, which also controls a database other health-insurance companies use to judge how much you get reimbursed and how much doctors get paid. . . . God willing and if the creek don't rise, as the saying goes, I might be in the High Sierra this time tomorrow, in a pesky canyon that used to resist radio- and TV-transmission and that still resists cell-phone transmission. . . . 'Tis the season when most Northwesterners give up on the pretense of maintaining a lawn and let the grass go blond and brown. Actually, the grass doesn't die; it just looks that way. I saw some poor sod (so to speak) spraying his brown lawn with water tonight, but his heart wasn't in it. Holding the hose was more of a gesture. . . . Meanwhile, I'm hatching Xeriscape plans that feature lots of gravel, boulders, hardy herbs, and drought-resistant plants. --But mostly boulders. One may water boulders, but one doesn't need to do so.


Top Chef

The celebrity tasters sample dishes cooked
competitively by erstwhile celebrity chefs
on a TV food-show. The tasters are
disappointed and get ready to reprimand
the chefs. They're about to opine when the
corpse of a starved person falls from
the ceiling of the TV studio onto their TV
table. Flies swarm out of the corpse's mouth
and seize the tasters' faces. The Food Judges'
hands turn to stone. The competing chefs use
this moment to flee from the show's decadent
premise. In this episode, there is no winner.


http://www.worldhunger.org/

Buddy's Cords of Wood

Buddy's Cords of Wood

Buddy was engaged to marry a woman who
lived in a white house on the hill. He
cut and stacked cords of wood for her.
Before Winter came, she broke off
the engagement and married another man,
who moved in with her. They burned
the wood Buddy had cut. Buddy lived
with his sister from then on. This

was in a town of 225 where few
can afford the luxury of embarrassment.
When Buddy cheated too obviously
at pinochle, the men banned him
from the games for a while. For
decades, an adage flourished in town:
"Don't cut wood for your beloved
until after you marry because some
bastard might end up burning it."


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Sometimes A Cat

This summer, our household features not one but two cats, a cerebral Russian blue, female, who is 10 years old, and a tabby who may have some Norwegian Forest Cat in his background; he is one year old. Her name is Lisa Marie, after Elvis Presley's daughter, and his name is Jerry Garcia. Jerry is a native of California, very laid back but also impulsive. We sense that Lisa Marie desires him to be more thoughtful. Unless they are supervised, the cats must be kept separate. When I watch television, the tabby gets up in a nearby chair and watches it with me. --Just a couple guys watching the tube.


Sometimes A Cat

Sometimes a cat relaxes so much,
it forgets where it is. That is,
sometimes a cat, relaxed, remembers
nothing is any place and anywhere
is nowhere in particular. A cat's
among the most in-particular creatures,
a purely present artist of equilibrium,
a monarch of the moment, eyes like
twin comprehending moons.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Scott Bateman on Lou Dobbs

I'm so old I remember when CNN had some credibility as a journalistic enterprise. No, really, I'm not kidding! Then it decided to "jump the shark" for ratings, so it tolerates the increasingly bizarre, micro-minded, sour-spirited rants of Lou Dobbs, for example. In all fairness, I have to say (well, I don't have to) that observing Lou's hair over the years has been a source of fascination. I am not on firm ground here, as my own "hair style" is an oxymoron. But at one point, Lou's hair looked almost tangerine in color. I'm lucky my job doesn't involve sitting under blazing lights, wearing makeup, and reading from a tele-prompter. To this extent, I sympathize with Lou and other on-camera crooners.

In any event, one of the most talented animators in the land, Scott Bateman, has produced a nice piece on Lou. One great thing about Bateman's work is that it simply but creatively uses the exact words of its subjects. Lou speaks, Bateman animates, and Bateman inserts comments:

http://trueslant.com/scottbateman/2009/07/24/lou-dobbs-nutjob/

On the Road to the Contagious Health-Care Bill

I have to agree with Fran-from-Canada's comment on the previous post: namely, that America's competitive streak prevents the U.S. from simply looking at nations who have successfully implemented health-care (and if it's not "universal," it's not health-care, as "health" refers to "whole") and imitating them, even if we acknowledge that some aspects of our situation may be different.


We mustn't overlook the cynicism of politicians and corporations either. The GOPers have made it plain that their only strategy is to stall and that the strategy is in service of the 2010 election. I think it's refreshing that they admit as much. They rank doing well in a mid-term election higher than providing reliable health-care coverage to (at least) 45 million persons who now go without it and who, if they're "lucky," get some help at an emergency-room. Meanwhile, the DEMsters will wrestle themselves into submission, easy pickings for lobbyists.

But let us turn to a physician who wrote poetry, W.C. Williams, and his "Spring and All," with its genius first line:

Spring and All

by William Carlos Williams

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines-

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches-

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind-

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined-
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf


But now the stark dignity of
entrance-Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken


Let us hope that those in charge of delivering the health-care goods will "grip down and begin to awaken."

For more information about this poem and W.C.W., please visit . . .

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5953

Corruption Even a Poet Can Understand

To the extent other industrialized nations pay attention to the U.S., they must wonder why establishing something as basic as adequate health-care for everyone is so hard for Americans to achieve. Availability to solid health-care for all citizens in a nation is about as basic as a good fire department is for a city. In this instance, "American exceptionalism" is not a compliment. Most reliable ratings of health-care systems worldwide put that of the U.S. around 35th (or so).

As you no doubt already know, one reason for our inability to get to this basic goal is that Congresspersons in effect answer to large health-"management" companies and insurance companies, who contribute a lot of money to campaigns and who employ people who previously worked in Congress as staffers. Thanks to a fellow blogger in Tacoma, I was able to look at a simple map of such corruption involving an important participant in the health-care legislation, Max Baucus, a U.S. Senator from Montana (and once you get to the chart, you may click on it to enlarge it):

http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/projects/2009/healthcare_lobbyist_complex/#baucus

Even a poet can grasp the corruption reflected in this chart!

Ancillary problems are that the alleged two-party system is, in effect, a one-party system wherein the two large parties suck up money from the same troughs, and that corporations may legally function as persons, so that trying to limit a corporation's monetary control of elections is depicted legally as an encroachment on "free speech," as if a corporation had vocal cords.

One piece of the current legislation delays the public option (which, among other things, would put pressure on insurance companies and also spread out the risk--you remember that simple insurance-concept) until 2013--after a) another presidential election, and b) a lot of people will have died, some of whom will die because of inadequate health-care. Demographically, it's in the insurance-companies' interest to have a lot of Baby-Boomers die; what a lovely bunch of coconuts. Meanwhile, when a citizen (or a visiting American, for that matter) in Canada or Sweden becomes ill, he or she (now, follow this complexity) goes to a doctor or a hospital to get treated without fear of being turned away for insurance-reasons or of going broke after being treated. Wow. It's almost like when a brush-fire occurs in a city and a crew from the fire department puts it out with water, quickly and professionally. If Baucus were in charge, the truck would show up late, charge the land-owner, and throw gasoline on the fire. Thanks for looking out for us, Max.

And yes, I know nothing is perfect in Canada or Sweden or elsewhere, but the American system suffers from more than imperfection. It just isn't functioning.

Moon Visits Altered History

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A headline in the Tacoma News Tribune two days ago read, "Moon Visits Altered History," and for an instant I misread "Visits" as being a verb and "Altered" as an adjective, so that the headline seemed to be about a journey the moon had taken.


Moon Visits Altered History


Orbit became a wearisome groove, a tedious
channel. Sun played the same old carom-shots
with rays, and just below, sad plants and creatures
marked the days. A bored moon unclipped itself
from gravity to visit an altered history.

It visited moon-museums in the gallaxy,
drank with disappointed asterioids who'd
aspired to be moons, interviewed multi-mooned
planets to ask how they kept their lunar
calendars straight. The moon was gone for a

month, exactly. No one but a few astronomers
and surfers noticed. The moon came back
to trudge its orbit like a mule, plowing
time, spinning space into legend.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Summer-Squash Soup

Hey, who recorded "(There Ain't No Cure For) The Summertime Blues," the Who? I imagine dozens of artists have recorded it in an attempt to cure the bank-account blues.

Anyway, it turns out there's a simple cure for the summertime blues, and as you might expect, it's soup. When in doubt, make soup!

Thanks to blogger, chef, and poet Minerva, we have ourselves a link to a recipe for Summer-Squash Soup (below). (Minverva reports that she added some previously cooked chicken to give the soup a little autumnal muscle, so if you're not rolling down the Vegan Highway at present, you may give that a try.)

http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=1809036

And Minerva is over at . . .

http://minervadamama.blogspot.com/

Summer Squash

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'Tis the season, in the Northern Hemisphere at least, for squash. I grew up calling yellow or crook-necked squash "summer squash," and I prefer it to zucchini, the hide of which is a tad bitter, and the meat of which can be watery. I used to like to pick yellow squash because in the garden, it often had some fuzz on it. One reason to plant a garden, I submit, is that it produces imperfection, such as the fuzz, which is rubbed off by the time squash makes it to a super-market super-slickly. For instance, the cucumbers I just harvested look pretty gnarly. They're fat and fine inside, but the hide looks like it's been in a scuffle, and one of the cucumbers has an odd twist to it. You just can't find that kind of imperfection in a produce-department, no matter how hard you look.

In case anyone asks, and I'm sure someone will do so, "squash" as a verb can mean not just to press down or in upon but also to join in a crowd of people--to squash about in the city, as it were--this according to the OED online. "Squash" as a noun may refer not just to zucchini, etc., but also to the unripe pod of a pea, and in this iteration, the word was often used insultingly. One would call someone a "squash," a mere unripe pod. "Hey, pal, as far as I'm concerned, you're an unripe pod." And here's news: "squash" as a noun used to refer as well to a muskrat--or "musksquash." Wow.

My desultory research did not go so far as to tell me how the racket-game, squash, got its name. Squash seems like the upper-class version of racquet-ball, but I could be incorrect in that impression.

When something feels as if it has been squashed, we sometimes say it appears squishy, don't we? What was squashed was squished, or squishified. ;-) I seem to remember that "squish" was also deployed as a verb, back in grammar (or lower) school: "Squish that spider, Irving, will you? Thanks."

I wish you a good summer of unsquished squash, eaten raw, steamed, or roasted, and may the squash you harvest be perfectly imperfect.

Moon Poems

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(image: Swiss cheese, the chief component of the moon, in spite of astronomers' and astronauts' protestations to the contrary)
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Not that you asked, but my favorite moon-poem is W.H. Auden's "This Lunar Beauty," chiefly because of the rhythm, which subtly echoes that of Jon Skelton's poetry.

Other good moon-poems include "Under the Harvest Moon," by Carl Sandburg, famous Swedish American; "Autumn Moonlight," by Matsuo Basho [how many haikus have a moon-image in the them, I wonder?] ; "Length of Moon," by Arna Bontemps; "The Moon Versus Us Ever Sleeping Together Again," by Richard Brautigan [I think we have a winner in the title-competition]; "The Moon Was But a Chin of Gold," by Emily Dickinson [I think we have a winner in the comparison-competition, and what a shock that's it's D: never mess with Ms. D.]; "Blood and the Moon," by W.B. Yeats; and "And the Moon and the Stars and the World," by Charles Bukowski.

Moon-Shot: The Missing Article

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(image: Jules Verne)
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Moon-Shot 1969: The Missing Article


Somewhere between the moon and the Sierra Nevada,
our TV-reception got fizzed. We leaned in toward
the Zenith set that labored to freight us images
of Armstrong. Outside, illusory sky still pretended
to be blue. " . . .one small step for man, one
giant leap for mankind," said the Zenith, and
I knew the first man on the moon had flubbed
prefabricated lines. The article "a" was missing,
and without it, "man" and "mankind" meant pretty
much the same thing in 1969. The article "a"

is still missing. It tumbles in the Milky Way,
silent in an unspoken vacuum. Yes, yes, I was
properly amazed like everyone else. And a little
sad. After a cumbersome astronaut stepped off a
ladder and set feet, the moon misplaced its
mythology and became dirt and a destination.

Man In A Hole

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Man In A Hole

In summer's citified humidity, one man
pierced a street's asphalt hide with a
jack-hammer. Then someone else in a yellow
back-hoe dug something like a grave. Soon
another man was standing in the hole. Orange
plastic cones stood sentry around him. He
wore a white hard-hat and an orange vest.
Cars passed thickly by on both sides, hauling
their noise, puffing exhaust-fumes, hardly
slowing down. The man's height had been cut
in half. His co-workers looked down at him
expectantly, as if he could fix anything--
sewer, water, electricity, earthquakes.
"People give me shit," he yelled, "and
I am tired of it."


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

W. H. Auden Site

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I recently ran across a site dedicated to W.H. Auden, master of lyric poems and long poems, genius at incorporating vocabulary and diction from a wide spectrum of sources into his poetry. His most anthologized poems include "Lullaby," "If I Could Tell You," "In Memoriam: W.B. Yeats," and "Musee des Beaux Arts." Collected Shorter Poems and Collected Longer Poems are both available from Random House/Vintage.

Here is a link to the site:

http://audensociety.org/