"Dear March - Come In," by Emily Dickinson

No Answer to the Ocean

It's like this, maybe: A tide comes in.


It brings things you come to believe.


There they are, objects on glassy sand.


They're what's come of all your coping.


A stone, a crab-shell, a worn piece of


wood, a string of kelp. They're no answer


to the ocean. They don't add up to a code.



You keep walking on the beach,


trying to figure things out. There's


nothing wrong with that--walking,


wondering. What are you hoping for?





Hans Ostrom

"The Silent Voices," by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Elvis in the Holy Land

(based on found language)


Deadline approaching
to book
Elvis tour to
Holy
Land.



hans ostrom

"The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sacramento Capitol Mall

Politicos stride like totalitarian colonels.

Professionals lean into conversations

about cash-flow, internal control, and impact (a verb).

Winos stand against a wall and shiver

their way out of hallucination,

their shirt-fronts soaked with the Lamb's

most inexpensive blood; bums pick through rubbish

and sleep under news; the mad testify

to streetlights and themselves.

No one runs for office anymore

except the staffs of those who ran before.

They govern each other and whisper about us.

Sunlight remains democratic.

We walk in it together

between the muddy river and the capitol.

We are lobbyist and lunatic, accountant and pickpocket,

admin-assistant, tech-person, plumber,

and Ph.D. student writing about

power-relationships.

I find myself wondering not at all

about the powerful. I focus on a trembling hand

that picks through garbage. I fork over

a few bucks to the hand's person.

who gargles the words, "God bless you."

 Somewhere there’s a photo

of that man when he was six years old

and squinting at the camera, happy in a summer

in another state.

Maybe you finally come to hate poverty

enough to pursue it as an art;

maybe a thousand left hooks in the downtown gym

finally leave your brain fizzed like pink champagne,

and you're on the street mumbling to a corner man

who isn't there. Or somebody dies, and your way

of understanding that is to let go the things

that hint of looking forward,

including the grammar of love,

and love of self, and taking tomorrow straight.

Yeah, so, I gave him a few bucks, which will

go for booze, not a sandwich, and I don’t care

because it’s not my money anymore,

and as the Capitol might whisper,

it never was. 

Copyright 2013 hans ostrom

"El Greco's 'Christ on the Cross,'" by Hans Ostrom

"The Spell is Broke, the Charm is Flown!" by Lord Byron

Twice-Believing Creatures

Twice-Believing Creatures

Crickets sing the word "ceasing" electronically

in dirt and dry stalks.

A heavy black beetle turns his belly

to the cosmos, plucks with his six feet

at the needles of a darkening pine bough.

The Magician dances out of straw. He is Dusk;

he juggles the sun and the moon and the evening star.

Here and there a few are alert,

some curious, some thankful--like the deer,

weary of swishing horseflies away

from their backsides all day and hungry

after the heavy afternoon;--like the raccoon,

waddling off to make a living at the pond's edge;

--and the tireless child, the old man

who stands near his garden listening to the corn grow,

and the woman with her hands folded,

singing out loud to nobody.

They know that dusk takes today's body

and brings another after an interlude of dreaming.

They know nothing of the sort;

they are as dubious as the light at dusk.

They know the world to be as new

as the note of a gnat in the ear, as old

as the lizard's dry smirk,

a boulder's personality, darkness.

Hans Ostrom, 2013

"My People," by Langston Hughes

"Tobaconnists," by Karl Shapiro

"Thy Body As It Is," anon.

"An Essay on Man," ii, 1-18, by Alexander Pope

Nude Up and Get in a Pile

It may have been a line
from North Dallas Forty.
Anyway, we’d quote it
at the bar and laugh.
The thing is, pre-AIDS,
you might think you
were headed home
in a silver Camaro after
the bars closed
in California’s inimitable
Central Valley.  Then you might
stop at a red light, two lanes,
and two women you knew
barely might laugh, roll
down the window, and
suggest, “Follow us.”
And, wow, there you’d be,
nuded up and in, no,
not a pile, but an expansive
naked arrangement of
three or four or five.
It was a gas, a blast, a trip:
listen to the lingo change
down the ages. Olive oil
on large breasts, the
several positions, good
clean fun. Of course, in
an apartment of your brain,
you knew the party had
to end—that night; and for you;
and for a generation.  Microbes,
maturity, and so on. None-
the-less: at the stop-light,
in a Camaro, a little loaded
on whiskey and weed and
maybe a line: the light,
the spark, of mischief.
Good clean fun in
an era everybody and
his mother, as we said,
would not just forget but
not know existed.

*
*
hans ostrom 2013

"Everything Is Looted," by Anna Akhmatova

"Friends Who Have Failed," by Alan Williamson

"As a Good Tailor Knows," by Jason Shinder

"How Strange," by Gwenolyn B. Bennett

Hiram Displays a Bad Attitude Toward Popular Cinema

Hiram, in his cups, which had been full
of vodka, says, "Let the miserable blob
lay. Lay the miserable fucking blob. Lay
miserly blob. Hey, Miz, lay Miz, Fizz Miz."

I can fill in the rest.  It isn't so much
the genre of musical, or the tears
being squeezed out of melodrama
like hot fat from cooked bacon,
or the celebrity-actors shoved out
in front of the cameras like mannequins
with entourages, or that the Public
eats this shit up, it's the combination
of all five; and more--that gnaws
at Hiram's sense of what is all right.

 "The whole fucking thing . . .," Hiram mumbles.
The combination. The combinations.
That's what gets a body down. In an age
of Packaging, Hiram opposes the Package.


hans ostrom 2013

"Some Hands Are Lovelier," by Mae V. Cowdery