"In the Mountains on a Summer Day," by Li Po.

"Wall Street at Night," by Lola Ridge

The Moon in Those Wild Magma Years

("The Moon May Have Had a Heavy Metal Atmosphere with Supersonic Winds,"
by Lisa Grossman, Science News, June 2017)


We thought we knew the moon:
pale and cool, the hard-working
servant of love, myth, tides,
Americans, and a genre called horror.

Turns out in its youth, the moon
was a crazy ball of magma, so hot
it vaporized metal and forged
an atmosphere, which brought

winds so blastful they made
waves in magma. (Surf this, bro.)
Finally this heat-addicted sphere
went straight, got clean, dried

out.  It slept it off under blankets
of sodium snow. When it awoke, it
had pock-marks. With chill indifference
it received cordial light from the sun.



hans ostrom 2017

Cooling Crow

This city's hot and smoky: fires
in British Columbia, climate change.
My acquaintances the crows are
suffering. I daily provide them
food, water, and a target for their ire
(me).  Today though they're really hurting.

On a wire, one of them looks
straight up at sky and opens
his mouth.  The bifurcated beak
looks like an enormous black
clothespin. This is the posture
of crow prayer.  God will listen.

God made crow. (Don't tell crow!)
This is the posture of a performed
aria in a silent crow opera. This
is crow cooling off. ( You knew
it would be dramatic.) This is rare
crow, too hot to caw complaints.


hans ostrom 2017

Oyster Shells

(near Hoodsport, Washington)

Otters, people, and seabirds covet
the plump valved purse
inside the casing, so every tide
leaves a pale gray rubble

of pillaged oyster shells,
which look like shards
of cloud that fell and
hardened.  Exterior:

rough sculpted, abstract,
ruffled at the edges
like concrete lace.
Some shells still embrace

a stone, creating a tactile
drama of inanimate passion.
It might remind us
that nature's an agony.

Oyster shells seem to ask
to be rescued and given value
in an economy. We pick some
up and carry them around a

while. They're fascinating
and worthless.


hans ostrom 2017

"Moonrise," by Gerard Manley Hopkins

"The Glory of the Day Was in Her Face," by James Weldon Johnson

"Willow Poem," by William Carlos Williams

"Storm," by H.D.

"The Fool's Song," by William Carlos Williams

Christ Based Cleaning

A sign on the side
of a white van
said, CHRIST BASED
CLEANING.  Excellent.

Gets a person hoping
for miracles mixed
with mopping and sweeping
and for a higher

minimum wage; for
speaking the truth
to local imperial thugs--
maybe after work?

This is just me, but
I wouldn't want evil
spirits cast into pets
that then sprint demonically

off a cliff. No. Throw
those bad seeds out
with the trash. Recycle
them for bloated politicians

to use ineptly. Oh,
Christ, more than a
billion times, y'all must
have thought, "What will

they think of next?"


hans ostrom 2017

Traffic Surf

Car traffic tonight
2017 sounds like a metal
ocean, tires and tires
laying down bass lines.

I've never wanted
to tell a sea to shut up.
In fact I've treated
surf noise as a lullaby

composed by hubris.
Concerning this endless
traffic enjambment,
my attitude is flat,

as if an itinerant psychiatrist
had injected my
brain with novocaine and
filled my ears with alloy.


hans ostrom 2017

"The White House," by Claude McKay

At the Edge of the Road One Evening

He was quite high and making
up nonsense songs as he stood
in battered sandals on the gravel.
Dusk. In one of the lyrics he

rhymed spaghetti with confetti.
It was a mournful ballad.
Turning from composing and
performing, he asked himself

if there was any discernible
reason for humanity. He was weary
of the standard answers. He
imagined looking at the human-

phenomenon from another side
of the galaxy and thinking,
"What's that for?" in a British
accent. He then heard his name

called and listened to the familiar
voice as if for the first time. Then
it was no longer dusk but night,
what a drag.


hans ostrom 2017

They Call Him The Numerator

Yeah, that's me.  The Numerator.  Freelance.
I'll work with any denominator--they all
think they're the sum of all parts, anyway.

Me--I come in, I represent myself
and no one else.  I get paid the same
whether I'm working for a 3, a

million, a square root, or some
ludicrous boutique unit. I have to say,
it's still a thrill to work as

one over one.  Gives one a bit of an
autotelic buzz.  All about a fitted whole
in a fragmented world, or some shit like that.



hans ostrom 2017

Stingrays

Small stingrays propel floating
as if they were broad flesh-leaves
rising from secret forests on the sea
floor. How can their skin be so softly
liquid to the touch? How can the edges
of their bodies undulate and curl so subtly?
The rays move like intuitive insight
through the mind of the water. They
are a marvelous surmise.


hans ostrom 2017

What They Told Him

You need a special color. The right card. The
appropriate look and lingo. You have to know somebody,
but not just anybody. Are you on the list?
No, not that list, stupid. It's not our fault

we resent you. You don't belong here.
We belong. You're not us. How did
you even get in here? Get out or we'll
call somebody, but not just anybody.

It's not our fault we hate you. It's yours.
You made that choice. If you were just
like we like people to be, you might
be all right, but you're not, so  you're not.

Got it? It's not our fault we don't know
anything about you.  Why should we? We
don't have time. We keep a list of  people
who's fault things are.  You're on that list.



hans ostom2017

Free-Radical Yearning

Sunlight just
before dusk
adds gold to fir trees'
green--shadows
in the boughs, dark lapis.

And sky's color
behind is at its palest
blue all day. I've
seen this burnished image,
only slightly varied,

hundreds of times
in the Sierra, in Sweden
and Germany, in
Istanbul and the Pacific
Northwest.

When it soaks in,
it always generates
a slow longing,

an impersonal sadness
involved with grandeur,
peace, and hope--all
far, far out of reach.

The heart, as we call
that mental zone, pretends
to want to ask the trees
to stay in that light,
beg the scene never to leave.

The question's
really a way to savor the mild
spiritual soreness, this
free-radical yearning,
this old, old emotion
which even other species
of hominid felt,
drawing from an immense,
invisible psychic lake.



hans ostrom 2017

Dragonfly Corpse Recovery

A blueberry's what
the head of the dead dragonfly
looked like.

A blueberry with a small
metallic visor attached.  Do you
covet video
of what was perceived and how
through that mono-goggle? Me, too.

The body looked like one of two
elegant eyebrow
from under which a Persian woman
looks wisely
upon the world. And the wings?
Stained glass

done in ash-gray, or crystal
camouflage
for hiding in fog. When the head
fell off
and fell into a paper cup,
it sounded like a final pebble
hitting a coffin.

The legs were a bunching of
collapsed angles,
the knees so terribly delicate.

Things fall apart.  Creatures, too.
But it's also true
that this dragonfly was one of those
beings that show

how Evolution's patience delivers
functional art
and inspired form to its client,
the unsentimental Earth.



hans ostrom 2017

Sunflowers Are Sad, Experts Claim

Propaganda notwithstanding, sunflowers
are morose. Their puritanical, resolute
stalks lift them up to be sacrificed
to the gods, which employ birds, flies,
and bees as visiting priests. The central

cycloptic seed-cushion--color of tobacco
juice--weighs too much, like depression.
Too, please note the celebrated solar petals

wrinkle like Edwardian handkerchiefs
left in a jungle. Oh, Sunflower, foster
child of Old Bill Blake, 1960s advertising,
and baseball players: I bow my head
to you and yours.  You grow, I garden,
and it's all work, isn't it?


hans ostrom 2017