Friday, June 9, 2017

Leonardo Showed Her Smile

Please consider starting
with this premise:
Ms. Mona Lisa's smile
is not mysterious.

Now you may release
the heap of stifling baggage,
and if you like,
enjoy the image as it is.


(after reading Leonardo Da Vinci, by Sherwin Nuland [2005].


hans ostrom 2017

William Tell Ravine

(a tributary of the North Yuba River, Sierra County, California)

Before he'd heard anything about Switzerland, Schiller,
Rossini & stuff, he'd looked across the river from the house
at the long white beard of William Tell Falls. The sheer-drop
ravine seemed perpendicular.  No home for trout.  Im-

pulsively, as usual, he decided to hike up there when he was
17. He headed out, crossed the river, climbed straight up,
more laddering than walking. Ravine was path as rock
and manzanita brush walled the sides. He made it

as far as the flat pool the falls slapped in a-rhythmic
pulses. Sounds of that constant collision careened
around the stone box. There was no climbing further.
In soaked jeans and wet boots, legs loaded up

with lactic acid, he slithered down like an arthritic
snake, satisfied to have spied on a geologic scene,
to have introduced himself to William Tell Ravine,
and to have seen water and rock in their own time.


hans ostrom 2017

Monday, June 5, 2017

American White Supremacy: the Constant Plague

It leads to the continuing slaughter and unnecessary imprisonment of African Americans.  It leads to impoverished and working-class Euro-Americans to vote catastrophically against their own personal and economic interests.  It leads Euro-American women to vote for an admitted sexual assaulter for President. It leads to enthusiastic, widespread display of a flag that represents slavery, rape, murder, and terror: the Confederate flag. It leads to an irrational foreign policy.  It gets conflated with patriotism and Americanism. 
It leads “pro-life” "Christians" to support a murderous justice system and a savage attitude toward healthcare, both of which kill people, just as it once led them to own slaves and lynch human beings.  It leads to de facto Jim Crow educational policies.  Even in relatively improved situations—such as the status of African Americans and Latino Americans in higher education—it leads to continuing dehumanization: racist graffiti on campuses, racist security “services,” racist treatment of professors and students, etc.
It is White Supremacy, an idea rooted in the fake science of 17th and 18th centuries, completely fictional constructions of multiple human species when in fact there is only one.  And obviously this idea helped to make slavery and genocidal colonialism, among other things, morally acceptable to alleged Christian nations, including ours.
White Supremacy never goes away.  It only changes shape, at most.  Slavery has ended, but widespread immiseration of minority populations remains, as does a proliferation of hate groups and lynching talk from elected representatives:  while still a U.S. Senator, Jim DeMint said of newly elected President Obama, “we will break him”; recently an elected official in the South said those responsible for removing monuments to confederate figures should be lynched.   The mindset leading to such rhetoric determines the character of the GOP, which is a White Supremacist Party.  As noted, de facto Jim Crow practices remain in the justice system, the political systems (voting rights eroded), the educational system, and the healthcare system.
Shortly before she retired from the liberal arts college at which I teach, a highly respected, nationally decorated colleague said to me, after I had mentioned the miserable jog the college did at recruiting and retaining Black students, “Why don’t they [African American students] just go to historically Black colleges [as opposed to “annoying” “us”,” I guess was the rest of the point.  In the GOP mind, she probably counts as a typical “liberal” professor.  Liberal and White Supremacist, unapologetically so.  Multiply her worldview by hundreds of thousands, and you’ll get some sense of how White Supremacy vitiates allegedly enlightened institutions. Imagine how that worldview inspires innumerable micro- and macro-aggressions, every day. 
White Supremacy affects the Left, with hard-line quasi-socialists, including Bernie Sanders, downplaying (at best) the presence and effects of racism.  It affects liberals, who may say the right things but are almost never as aggressive as they need to be to wipe out White Supremacy.  It affects seemingly smart men like Justice Roberts, who asked, when the continuation of the Voting Rights Act was before the court, just how long such an Act (and other measures) was supposed to be allowed to go on.  In other words, when would “they” (African Americans) be satisfied?  Embedded in the rhetoric is the attitude of a White Supremacist doing somebody a favor and growing oh so weary of it.  The answer to the “how long” question is “as long as it takes,” of course.  And of course his Court struck down the Act, or at least its most potent parts, and doing so led directly to widespread voter suppression in the South and Midwest, where White “Christian” governors and legislatures reign.
It affects identity, not just in the narrow sense of “identity politics,” but in the sense that millions of Euro-Americans simply cannot construct an identity that doesn’t depend significantly on the belief that in some deep biological sense, they are superior to African Americans. 
I just had lunch with a remarkably smart, well educated, successful former student who is African American.  She said that after Trump was elected, “it didn’t take long” for a White man driving a truck with a Confederate flag decal to yell the N-word and other violent expressions at her—no, not in the South, but in Westlake Village, Los Angeles.  Subsequently she visited Kansas City, Missouri, where she “didn’t feel safe” because of how White folks were behaving in public.  Multiply her experiences by millions and imagine the psychological impact on African Americans.  Imagine the stress this impact creates.
White Supremacy is certainly tied up in Trump’s pulling out of the Paris accord on global warming because gleeful ignorance, doing thing because you can, showing contempt for scientists in particular and higher education and research in general, and throwing your imagined White Man weight around are linked to this problem of identity.
It affects the media, not just White Supremacist Fox News but also more mainstream outlets, who rarely mention the profound White Supremacist appeal of Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and the rest of the GOP and who rarely challenge the Democrats on their feckless or non-existent responses to racist policies. 
It certainly affects academia, informing notions of the liberal arts, hurting students and professors, and leading other professors into very sad, racist territory, putting the lie to all their high-minded posturing.
Decades ago, the genial, urbane legal scholar Derrick Bell told me that he was telling friends that vicious racism [White Supremacy] in the U.S. would never go away.  And he added that a feeling of relief, at least briefly, came over him when he recognized and expressed that fact.
As a political and social entity, Euro-Americans have always had the power to knock the crap out of White Supremacy.  Instead, they take half-measures—at best.  Otherwise, they are by turns uselessly guilty, stupidly liberal, viciously “conservative” [let’s get real: the GOP is the same as the Dixiecrat Party], unctuously sympathetic, and enthusiastically harmful. They say shit like “I never owned slaves,” which is supposed to lead to the logical conclusion that “so I don’t have to do anything about White Supremacy [except enjoy it.”  “All lives matter,” “Obama got elected—what more do you want?,” “make American great again,” “Obama isn’t American,” and yadda yadda yadda. They do things like defending  murderous policing and voting for Donald Trump, already in the category of worst presidents ever--although he doesn’t own slaves, as Jefferson and Washington (among others) did. 
Euro-Americans simply won’t get the job of eradicating White Supremacy, its legacies, and its consequences, done.  Much of the time, they perpetuate it, on purpose or through indifference and willful ignorance.  White Supremacy should be, but never will be, part of our daily political dialogue, given the horrors for which it has been responsible.  It is at the amoral core of the U.S.  It is the most obvious matter of urgency and the most ignored.  Sure, there are multiple factors that led to the election of a gleefully White Supremacist, “birther” President, who is catastrophically unfit for that position.  But if there were no White Supremacy or if there were only an enfeebled remnant of it, there would be no President Trump.   
The disease of American White Supremacy thrives like a plague.  It makes everybody sick, one way or another.  I have no clue what to do about it, even though I write against it and do very tiny things in my very tiny sphere to oppose it.   I wish something would wake up Euro-Americans, en masse.   Wishing is not a strategy. 

Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Cookbook Unrest

I hear the cookbooks in the kitchen--
garrulous relics from pre-digital times.

They flop around on the floor. They
gossip about how and what I cook.

"Seriously," one of them says, "if he's
going to improvise all the time,

why consult us, why insult us?"
God damn their greasy pages.

The chefs who authored them: bah!
No one should be famous for cooking.

A cat has heard the books now.
He becomes a lynx and bounds

off into the kitchen.  It's quiet
in their all of a sudden.  That's right:

close yourselves, you recipe barns.
Digest your dissatisfaction.



hans ostrom 2017

Fowl Dreams

If I were a bird,
I'd ride on air and often
cock my head for different
angles. At night I'd close
my eyes from the bottom,
snooze on a roost,
and rest my beak.

Anything with a brain
dreams. Oh, imagine--
you can try: what
kind of dreams do
birds dream, and why?

Maybe they dream
of staying still and having
food come to them.
Maybe they dream
of the time when they
were dinosaurs.



hans ostrom 2017

Ghosthood

I'll tell you what it's like to be a ghost:
No one sees you.  If you talk, people
don't hear. They will not see you wave.
The apparitional circumstance
is worse than loneliness. It is

to experience nothing.  It is to be
the consciousness of No. Being a ghost
is like wandering an Earth covered
with desert.  It is the desolation
of an infinite bleached sky.


hans ostrom 2017

Thursday, May 11, 2017

A Blues Collage

brown earth, muddy river
slashing sun, hard hands
long train, long train, long train

hard laughter, heavy fatigue
broken tools, bad food
long train, long train, long train

sweet tea, hot coffee
cold beer, good jukebox
cool rain, cool rain, cool rain


hans ostrom 2017

Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Dialectic

Mother, gather. Father,
proffer. Mother, other.
Father, farther. Mother,
smoother. Father, rather.

Mother, feather. Father,
weather. Mother, mystery.
Father, factory. Mother,

whisper woe, oh
no. Father falter slow.
Father go, gone.
Ma, Pa, dead,

dust, as they
must, as we
must, just so
very soon. And

the moon here
from the first,
once of Earth,
round and round.


hans ostrom

Lunar Eclipse Seen from the Central Valley

(California: April 1979)


 We sipped tequila from a bottle,
saw a shadow push into the moon,
which took on a planet’s gravitas,
losing its varicose craters, its

coin’s gloss.  Then its yellow
turned brown and red enough
to make a farmer look at it
as arable space. We enjoyed

the eclipse’s math and chance,
tried to focus binoculars
using a rooftop TV antenna
as approximative point.

We tried to shape our minds
around such fear and magic
as hunters/gatherers
may have felt. We failed.

We joked, and after midnight,
we opened doors of our several
abodes in a college-town stucco
hive.  We set clocks,

listened to household engines,
to music from vinyl undulating on a
turn-table like glassy harbor
water. Our dreams orbited desire.




Hans Ostrom 1979/2017

Friday, April 21, 2017

The Collector

The Collector


If you’re his wife, you’ve quit
asking why it all piles up out there
in the yard for everyone to see
from the highway.  Hubcaps from ghostly coupes.
Beer signs in neon cursive.  Coke machines,
cars, cars, cars.  You keep the house
and the backyard according to your principles.
You hate the mechanism in men
that drives them to love machinery.

If you’re his dog, you
urinate on tires encircling weeds.
You sniff varieties of rust,
chase squirrels until they disappear,
until you ram your hot wet nose
into angle iron; it all
makes the yard difficult.

Now, supposing you’re the younger son,
you don’t hate him yet.
Your friends think he’s a wealthy man,
a pirate maybe; they beg
their parents to let them come over,
Crawl through doorless cars, turn
cranks, patent imaginary uses

for useless contraptions.  You know
what it’s all for.  It’s there
to look at, to touch; it’s part
of a big landscape that whirls by
every day outside of School.

You’re the collector.  You can’t
help yourself. You’ll fix one thing
and trade it away for three things
you can’t fix.  The dog pisses on it all,
knocks over cans going after squirrels,
laps up rust-water.  You can’t
keep The neighbor-kids away. 

The younger boy, he follows you around
all day asking What’s this for?  What’s
this for?  You can’t understand why
your wife can’t understand why iron
and motors and axles are necessary,                                       
why strewn is the best way to keep
it all in order.

You stare right back at people
who drive by and scowl at your yard.
You know they’re driving junk.
Their houses are filled with junk that works.
You’ll get hold of it soon enough.


Hans Ostrom, from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006

Balzac's Ghost and the Crucial Detail




She brought the wrong clothes to Paris,
which wasn’t as warm as imagination.
She borrowed a sweater and a coat
from me; also shoes, and the heavy socks
that made them fit.  My sweater, especially,
seemed to enjoy having her wear it
in cafes, brasseries, and markets. I

explained all this to Balzac’s ghost
at the writer’s home on Rue Raynouard.
Even though I wasn’t speaking French,
Balzac understood immediately. I went
on to observe that almost everyone
almost everywhere works hard and life
slips by so quickly and then all of a sudden

you’re a ghost listening to a tourist.
Yes, yes, said Balzac’s ghost, but
tell me, what color is the sweater she
borrowed from you? Green, I said.
That, he said, is today’s crucial detail.

Hans Ostrom

from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Puget Sound, Winter

Attend the winter light along the Sound.
Recall the rivers and the runs of fish?
The Earth agrees to fail; the year’s come down.

Most days the sun, per se, cannot be found
Except in willow leaves, low clouds, and mist
Attending Winter light along the Sound.

Maybe the salmon will again astound
Us with erotic, suicidal quests
Though Earth agrees to fail and years come down.

The young that work drink hard in this hard town.
Nation slaughters nation, no peace can last,
And Earth agrees to fail as years come down.

Shall we allow all fish to run aground
And Earth to die several unnatural deaths?
Attend the Winter light along the Sound.
The Earth agrees to fail. The year’s come down.



--Hans Ostrom/2015


White Curse

"As for now, it must be said that the elevation of the belief in being white
was not achieved through wine tastings and ice-cream socials but rather through
the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land." --Ta-Nehisi Coates, "Between the World
and Me," The Atlantic, July 4, 2015



Of course a given white person
can be right in the head
about America's white-supremacist
essence, which is fed by rivers from Hell.

Collectively though we white folks
always have an alibi, an out,
a turning away or an overlooking.
And until we lose all the excuses

and make things right for
good, America will stay
hexed by whiteness. And what looks
more like the spawn of a

curse than one of our worst--
this depraved President of the U.S.?


hans ostrom 2017