Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Monday, March 10, 2014
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Friday, March 7, 2014
Sunday, March 2, 2014
"Lucid Mansion"
Grace creates a spaciousness,
a spacious nest like a meadow
between cedar groves, or a placid
piazza—a place, that is,
for consciousness to consider
its conscious nest,
its fortunate fest of being. In
the howling storm of time,
grace manages to accrue
some space, in dark
vacuity manages to
maintain a lucid mansion.
hans ostrom 1984/2014
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Men at 60
Men at 60 have certain
urges. Check that. They
imagine they have certain
urges. Men at 60 are
uncertain. They rarely
speak or act as if
they are uncertain.
Men at 60 wonder if
they'll die right now
walking in sunlight or just
later sleeping or at
63.27, 80, 71, 69.45,
or . . . . Men at 60
unlike men at 40 or 50
aren't appealing, even
to themselves. Dear
Narcissus: Go fuck yourself.
Men at 60 have done it all
and done nothing and done
some things that have
amounted to nothing. They're
bored by photos of koala
bears and panda bears and
most every other
goddamned thing.
At 60 men eat the same things
over and over. Secretly
they hate their own opinions
most of all. If they don't,
they should. Men at 60
like to hear singing but
do not like to plan to or
to pay to listen to it.
Men at 60 have bizarre
ugly regions on their
bodies, too many to count.
hans ostrom 2014
urges. Check that. They
imagine they have certain
urges. Men at 60 are
uncertain. They rarely
speak or act as if
they are uncertain.
Men at 60 wonder if
they'll die right now
walking in sunlight or just
later sleeping or at
63.27, 80, 71, 69.45,
or . . . . Men at 60
unlike men at 40 or 50
aren't appealing, even
to themselves. Dear
Narcissus: Go fuck yourself.
Men at 60 have done it all
and done nothing and done
some things that have
amounted to nothing. They're
bored by photos of koala
bears and panda bears and
most every other
goddamned thing.
At 60 men eat the same things
over and over. Secretly
they hate their own opinions
most of all. If they don't,
they should. Men at 60
like to hear singing but
do not like to plan to or
to pay to listen to it.
Men at 60 have bizarre
ugly regions on their
bodies, too many to count.
hans ostrom 2014
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Friday, February 21, 2014
Reconnaissance Pilot
The higher power and impersonality
of satellites
and drones have nearly made him obsolete; still,
eccentrically aloft, he guides
his delicate aircraft
on airstreams that flutter an
enemy flag
several miles below, and he banks
like the gesture
that leads a ballerina's turn,
but he desires no audience.
What intricate obsession has jeweled this
cockpit
with a dazzling, Latinate instrumentation?
In this black, airless sky of ice crystals,
his heat-sensitive cameras caress
an agriculture of warfare below:
missile silos,
grids of weaponry, infantry and air
corps
stored in barracks like dormant
bees.
If he prays, probably it is a
tactical prayer:
not to become a blotch
of light smeared into a streak
by a radar's radial sweep. For
when his wings
brush enemy airspace, he becomes
a heresy against Treaty,
a target fit for the righteous,
howling fighter-planes
curving up in silver clusters out
of dark under-space.
In Indianapolis his wife once
awoke terrified
from a dream in which ground-artillery
had blasted his
airplane into a shower
of alloy and plexiglass; but in
his own dream,
ejecting in time, he hangs by slender cords
beneath a dome of silk like a
spider traveling on the breeze.
For those precious moments, he is borne in a world
without radio or loyalties or
mission. And then he tumbles
on frozen turf or is it an orchard
or a cornfield?--
slowly rises to un-clip the
cords,
to assume his villain's stance like a
scarecrow--
soldiers
with faces
all alike flocking toward him, radios squawking
a foreign static, an orange dawn
entering enemy East.
Captured, he knows he should be
afraid or courageous,
but instead he simply longs for
the farmland
surrounding Bloomington, Indiana.
copyright Hans Ostrom 1979/2014
Thursday, February 20, 2014
"Truck Driver's Aubade"
Listen: sunrise stirs bugs in dry grass.
The long whine of a steel guitar
curves into a wide blue highway.
This peace is easy to take, I'll
tell you.
We kiss, kick off the covers
as if they were dead butterflies,
and grab each other, laughing.
The radio drops out its
three-chord,
Two-minute-fifty songs,
most of them the same
except for the names, just like
the matchbooks in amber ashtrays
on the sticky counter-tops
on outdoor tables at truck-stops.
--Where I’ll rest elbows,
the thick roar of sixteen
tires still in my ears.
Darling, if I look at the ass of
the waitress
while she's filling up my Thermos,
know it's only out of habit.
If my heart growls like a diesel
for you
when dawn spills across the hood
of the Peterbilt, know I'm thinking
of this morning
and of gearing down again on the
grade
a full two miles from your place. This place.
copyright Hans Ostrom 1983/2014
"Mainz, April"
in memory of Karl Dietz
(1981)
Around the train station, all is order
and bewilderment, punctuality and haste.
The drivers pilot their hinged busses into the crowd
of stout German women and nervous U.S. soldiers.
It is April, and the sunlight is without warmth.
To account for the chill, one invents
a theory of weather, in which the wind
always blows from Berlin, from Poland, from Russia.
It is a short walk from this tense station
to the red sandstone cathedral
and the place where Gutenberg set up shop.
The buildings along the way are
unassuming, neither old nor new. They were built
when history paused for a moment,
as if history could do that.
You may notice a solitary, jagged wall--
a shard from an Allied bombing raid.
Schiller's statue faces a sparkling jewelry store.
The stone streets in the Altstadt
and the shoulders of the great cathedral
are a relief to uneasy visitors
and troubled Mainzers alike.
Or I imagine so.
Lore mumbles that the Allies preserved
Wiesbaden, across the river,
for Eisenhower’s headquarters.
In a frivolous moment, therefore, one might
think of the casino, the spas, the architecture,
and Brahms--and say, "The nineteenth century is over there."
Not true, obviously. There are only more flowers,
more parks, a less dogged procession of soldiers,
clerks, and managers. There is a big-hearted
colleague named Karl and his family.
Having a coffee indoors as the afternoon dies
too quickly, one thinks hard about the Cathedral,
Gutenberg's printing, the French fort, the river,
the bombing missions in which an uncle
may have taken part, the people bombed,
the people shipped to camps and ovens,
the people like me who were born afterward,
the people who will think of 1981
as a long time ago.
But nearly everyone seems to clutch
at this day in 1981, at every today, anxiously;
we are all in a rush to be on time--to
make the 17:25 bus, not the 17:52.
Punctuality becomes an end in itself.
Me, I seem anxious to get back to
the white stucco apartment
in Bretzenheim or to an office
in the glass-and-steel building
at Gutenberg University, where I teach
writing in English, American government,
and my own behavior, which
the German students mark.
A person is urged to think about
history, to have thoughts about
history, to opine. The truth is
I'm weary of trying to think
profound thoughts about
what happens, what happened.
copyright Hans Ostrom 1981/2014
(1981)
Around the train station, all is order
and bewilderment, punctuality and haste.
The drivers pilot their hinged busses into the crowd
of stout German women and nervous U.S. soldiers.
It is April, and the sunlight is without warmth.
To account for the chill, one invents
a theory of weather, in which the wind
always blows from Berlin, from Poland, from Russia.
It is a short walk from this tense station
to the red sandstone cathedral
and the place where Gutenberg set up shop.
The buildings along the way are
unassuming, neither old nor new. They were built
when history paused for a moment,
as if history could do that.
You may notice a solitary, jagged wall--
a shard from an Allied bombing raid.
Schiller's statue faces a sparkling jewelry store.
The stone streets in the Altstadt
and the shoulders of the great cathedral
are a relief to uneasy visitors
and troubled Mainzers alike.
Or I imagine so.
Lore mumbles that the Allies preserved
Wiesbaden, across the river,
for Eisenhower’s headquarters.
In a frivolous moment, therefore, one might
think of the casino, the spas, the architecture,
and Brahms--and say, "The nineteenth century is over there."
Not true, obviously. There are only more flowers,
more parks, a less dogged procession of soldiers,
clerks, and managers. There is a big-hearted
colleague named Karl and his family.
Having a coffee indoors as the afternoon dies
too quickly, one thinks hard about the Cathedral,
Gutenberg's printing, the French fort, the river,
the bombing missions in which an uncle
may have taken part, the people bombed,
the people shipped to camps and ovens,
the people like me who were born afterward,
the people who will think of 1981
as a long time ago.
But nearly everyone seems to clutch
at this day in 1981, at every today, anxiously;
we are all in a rush to be on time--to
make the 17:25 bus, not the 17:52.
Punctuality becomes an end in itself.
Me, I seem anxious to get back to
the white stucco apartment
in Bretzenheim or to an office
in the glass-and-steel building
at Gutenberg University, where I teach
writing in English, American government,
and my own behavior, which
the German students mark.
A person is urged to think about
history, to have thoughts about
history, to opine. The truth is
I'm weary of trying to think
profound thoughts about
what happens, what happened.
copyright Hans Ostrom 1981/2014
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