Friday, July 21, 2017

A Sultan at Sunset

Thirty feet up, the hummingbird hovered,
looking at sunset behind blue, wrinkled
Olympic Mountains. After a long day
of nectar-hauling, why not? Sitting facing

East, I watched the bird watch. I then
saw it trace with its body an enormous
precise circle in air.  Wondering what
or if this circle signified was a gift

grand enough for a sultan.  The invisible,
unforgettable shape suggested geometric
graffiti, avian ritual, or a secret signal
to the sun.  I almost applauded.

The whirring bird zipped off to close
the astounding performance: what a pro.
As Sultan, I decree my hummingbird
equal to Whitman's eagle, Poe's raven,

the crows of Ted Hughes and Al
Hitchcock, Shelley's and Mercer's
skylark, and Bukowski's murdered
mockingbird. (I refuse to discuss

Yeats's rapist Zeus-goose.) The effect of
this decree, the Sultan does not know.


hans ostrom 2017

Millipedes and Words

Those armored locomotive tubes,
millipedes, lived with us, resting
on cool cinder-block walls
in our tomb-like living room.

We left them alone unless guests
were expected. (You know how
guests are.) Otherwise, they stank
too much to mess with, excreting

hydrogen cyanide, and their
innards were too awfully, softly
much. (I killed one in the bathroom
once.) If we'd lived in Thailand, say,

where millipedes aspire to be snakes
then some frontier shit would have
gone down. Since they were only of
several purple-brown inches, co-

habitation worked satisfactorily.
This arrangement was decided
silently, no family discussion
(the horror). Words were to be spent
on work, hilarity, or arguments.



hans ostrom 2017

Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Another Old Concept Stopped By Today

Home is a place where you keep
your stuff and almost have privacy.
Could be mansion, could be cardboard
box.  Home is were you live
at the moment.  Is home home?

I have felt it isn't.  I have felt
it is a forgery.  That said, Go home,
said with kindness quietly,
seems to be in every language
always good advice.  Probably

home is where you'll probably
stay instead of going to that
other place to do those sociable
things.  Home might be. With luck
it might be where things are easier.



hans ostrom 2017

Lighting Out

I'm lighting out for infinity.  I don't
yet have a firm idea of when
I will arrive. Oh, everybody says
it's going to take me "forever."
The truth is they don't know.

Who could blame infinity
for getting sick of extending
itself, for stopping and settling
down?  I think on my way,
I'll come around a bend,

and there will be a town,
a scape of mirrors, towers,
boulevards, gardens with
gigantic butterflies and
multicolored trees.  It will

all have been designed by
close associates of time.
After I settle in, I'll
ask if anybody knows the street
on which I might find infinity.

Of course I'll try to reach
the residence by phone or signal
ahead of time.  Manners matter.
What sort of gift should I bring?
What sort of song should I sing?


hans ostrom 2017

Thursday, July 6, 2017

The Key

There's someone in the basement wailing.
It must be that fellow other tenants call Poe.
That's all I know. Wailing and Poe.
I don't own, don't hold the keys to,
that ambitious dungeon. Otherwise,
I'd knock trepidation aside and descend
toward the sound like a responsible person.

I start wailing myself.  Weakly, at first.
And I begin to wonder what the tenants
will call me, if indeed mournful cries
lead to nicknames and dungeons.  It
all depends on what the rules are. The key
will be to know who has the key.



hans ostrom 2017

Wednesday, July 5, 2017

I Robin, I

I robin tip
my body forward
on an axis
when I hop-walk.
I robin stand
up tall after
I stop. I
robin turn my
head to listen
to/look at grass,
so to seek
evidence of worms.

I robin swallow
a worm whole
with a bit
of dirt. I
robin may also
chop worms into
pieces, then eat,
or take them
back to nestlings

I robin like
my orange feather
shirt and my
gray feather jacket.
I robin fly
and hop with
other robins long
ways after something
changes in the weather's
tone of voice.

I robin flute
fluidly my tune,
I robin I. 


hans ostrom 2017

Monday, June 26, 2017

Harrier Mind

Your mind's pressing in again,
isn't it?  Harrier mind. It raps
on doors and windows, jiggles
locks, leaves ugly messages.

It's a double agent, a drill
sergeant, a bully, a beast.
Hunker down. Think of this
annoyance as mental theater.

Fall asleep before intermission,
muttering, "Mind, you exhaust me."



hans ostrom 2017

Big Shift Necessary

Oh, Switzerland, oh
shoes. Oh piety and booze.
Oh capitalists and nest-
robbers, mud-daubers
and multi-chambered tombs.

Oh wombs and the women
who carry them and carry
history, mystery, misery,
work, and care.  Where
is the wisteria? Where
are the boundaries drawn
by people who shouldn't?

Oh people, grow up.  It's
time. Stop worshiping
stupidity and sanctifying
greed. Lose the White
Supremacy and its evil,
desiccated heart. Discharge
sinister ministers. Own up.

'Fess up. Follow the money,
but don't let it be Lord. We
are one species, so work it
out from there.  Oh, hair.


hans ostrom 2017

Found Towns Lost

In daylight tiny
rural towns pretend
not to feel foolish
and depleted. There's
activity. An enthusiastic
conversation or two.
Errands and repairs.

At night streets
(such as they are)
become empty corridors
because people give
up, go inside, and
refuse to be towns-
people, too ridiculous.

Some shops weep,
others moan. If electricity
goes there at all, it
races through power
lines hoping not to be
used there. Before

dawn, animals file
through in a loose
parade.  Raccoons,
stray dogs, feral
cats, owls, and sometimes
a coyote. The stoic church
bell sweats rust, and
all the glory's in ornate
tombstones on a hill.


hans ostrom 2017

Friday, June 9, 2017

You Know?

We know we know
enough to know
we'll never know
enough to say
for sure we're sure
we know enough.


hans ostrom 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.