Friday, November 19, 2021

Inventory after Flood

Last night the river flooded
and hauled away my answers.
I should not have stacked them
so near the bank. I'm left 

with questions stored
in small dry places, bowed
shelves, bitter boxes. So far
the roof is holding.

Rain slaps and pummels
it in surges. I start
to unpack questions.
My smashed answers

roll and twist toward
a delta or a dam or just
rocks on the way. Today
I fret and squirm and

say What are they for?
What are they for? 
This only adds to a stuffed
frustrating inventory. 


hans ostrom 2021

Tuesday, November 2, 2021

Őland

 Őland


(islands east of the Swedish mainland)


We sail past rocks that glaciers
rubbed round, so the square story
goes. Round heads of old monks,
slick heads of seals sleeping on
black-boulder islands.

We’re sailing to a land, Åland.
It belongs to water, a semi-nation of Swedes
governed by Finns, its very-own flag
air-snapped by unconquered winds.

Three old Swedish men, drinking beer
this early morning, mutter
stories of boats, ships, water, and things
that go wrong. “Panama,” they say.
And “Gävle.” “Titta,” they say: Look,
and we pass the rocks past Őland.

The rocks pass us, looking. Things can’t
go wrong with rocks but can go
wrong on them. White swans
fly by. Earth never stops whirling—
so grave story goes. “Ibland,” the men
say. Sometimes. For Ő, which is island,

say O but with tongue lifted to middle,
an island the vibrations flow past
and out through the O into air.
Å is just oh, and oh is just water.

In Waterland, land becomes a sought-after afterthought:
“Oh. . . . Land.” Ibland. Åland. Őland.


1994/2021











Tuesday, October 26, 2021

Abandoned Cistern

A few raindrops 
make it through
brush overgrowing
an ancient cistern.

They make the 
slightest sound
as they hit cool
still water. The

cistern used to be
famous. People 
gathered there. Some
were important

and carried themselves
so. Posture, gestures,
clothes, high talk.
They knew and didn't

know that one day
it would be as if
they'd never been 
anyone, anywhere, 

anything. 

Thursday, October 21, 2021

A Place to Live

I did not dream I was
assembling an encyclopedia
of all the dreams I'd dreamed.

I did dream an old dream
of searching for a place to live
in of all places Davis California--
wandering in a warm anxious
night of delta breezes,
pressed but plodding--
my usual anti-style.
I never find the place, nor
the elusive seminar 
in German that will allow
me to finish the Ph.D.--
retroactively. Short breaths
and writing wake me. 

I've planned
tonight to dream about your
dream--that spectacular one,
full of light--vibrant street
stirring, with that strange
person in a dark cafe 
who asks to know all about
your life but won't listen. 

If this doesn't sound like
something you'd dream,
please tell your subconscious
mind to text me
from the Cloud, and I will
explain further, but the main
thing is I hope you've 
found a place to live. 


hans ostrom 2021

At Any Rate, Fate

It's coming down the mountains.
  It's climbing up the trees.
It's bubbling up from sidewalks
  And rising to my knees.

It knows bad jokes
  I often told and
Knows each time I cried.
  Doesn't care about my failures
Or all those times I lied. 

It is the Master of the Actual,
  the Mistress of Right-Now.
It's Fate that's heading hard my way.
  I don't know When or How. 


hans ostrom 2021

Sunday, October 10, 2021

Midday

(considering Arkady Plastov's 
painting, "Midday," 1961, Russian
Museum, St. Petersburg)

This view will never tell me
what's between the woman and man--
love? Siblings? Friends? It makes me
feel heat lean into their backs

as they lean over that dark wood trough.
Only summer light infuses weeds and
grass this way, gives  them  a furnace
glow. A swooning heat of dreams.

She'd love to bathe, pats her head with
water with her right hand, cups some
in her left. He wants to drink. In
weeds the motorcycle's lean and red,

a bulbous lamp. I say this is a work-
break and think of midday respite
from work in the Sierra. If I stood
with them, I'd used both hands

to cool my face, my neck. I see 
bugs in that grass, youth in those
backs. After the snarl of that bike
fades, I'll slip into the painting,

watch trough-surface tremble,
settle, feel the waterlogged wood,
hear the hiss of grass, feel
sorrow, look for shade. 


hans ostrom 2021

Tuesday, October 5, 2021

Fires in the Pacific West

Blue wood smoke from wildfires
100 miles away choked the copse.

A morose old traveler sat down 
in it beside a pond. He thought At

least the pond's still here. As was
his fear for everything. An

hallucinated frog lifted its head
from the smoke-scummed water

level, said Nothing you will ever
write, say, do, or think will change

this world, okay? The old man
had always loved amphibians,

the great adapters. He asked Should
I stop caring, then?  But the frog

had absented its green mirage, 
and so: alone, talking in the woods.

Even if you try to be loud, your
voice sounds less than the tiny

ratchet-grind of one grasshopper
leaping. Yes, no more caring today.

Only walking. To home. If it's still
there. If not, more walking. 


hans ostrom 2021

Sunday, October 3, 2021

Talking at Night

Maybe you're high, maybe not.
Either way, you're half of 
a conversation that grows
in the night. A seed of chit-
chat roars into a jungle 
of topics, blather, laughter,
and--for this neighborhood,
anyway--deep questions.

You wonder, at the end of 
night, what these are for,
these night talks. Nothing's
bought or sold, no politics
of the moment, name-dropping,
weather, or work. Nor set stories,
thank god. Just talk--

rare these days, these days
when words get nailed to 
walls, kidnapped, suffocated
by intent ignorance, shot dead. 
Just talk, easy as a summer tide.



hans ostrom 2021

Breathing in Blue Lunar Light

He had intended 
to seize the day.
Then night came.
Day slipped away.
He was relieved. 

Night seized him. 
Hot winds and nausea. 
He didn't believe what
he knew or know
what he believed.

Waking, midnight, he
saw blue lunar light
that mellowed air,
turned worries  slight.
He breathed. And breathed. 


hans ostrom 2021


Monday, September 20, 2021

Wright Park

In Tacoma the old man
crossing Wright Park
will not use a path
and ignores the statue

of Schiller, a German
poet who never visited
Tacoma--his loss. I can't

find a verb to say what 
the old man does as he 
goes up the slope
to the conservatory. It is

his own peculiar old
white-haired way of walking,
wearing a blue windbreaker
on a hot afternoon. Perfect

verbs and muscular 
buttocks belong to the young.
A woman in orange shoes
floats past him. Her profile

is regal. Now someone full
of Jesus moves through the park
preaching to purple-eyed drunks.
Acorns drop like hail pellets.
A three-year-old roll down a
slope, bedazzled, giggling.

The old man smiles at this,
arrives at the conservatory,
cough and spits. 


hans ostrom 2021

Friday, September 3, 2021

Fear Tonight

Tomorrow I'll be ready
to attack the tasks at hand,
jaw set, mind sure.
Tonight I will be frightened.

Tomorrow I would gladly
board a submarine, float
under darkness, sounding depths,
negotiating canyons.

Tonight under a single lamp,
all the hands of fear flutter
like a deck of cards cast
overboard from a broken boat. 


hans ostrom 2021

Sunday, August 29, 2021

As We Build

Two dime-sized yellow-green butterflies
copulate on a pine board we
nailed at an angle to brace a partition. 

They're connected like duelists
about to pace: one board's edge,
the other perpendicular on the broader

plane. Their antennae do not so much
as twitch: wings rigid as steel, eyes
like polished obsidian pebbles, placidly

glazed. Amid slamming hammer blows,
electric saw scream, and sawdust storm,
they're lost in the depth and breadth 

of regeneration. As we raise another wall,
it's sap-wet ribs seem to bless with shadows
in a geometric pattern these two insects

abstracted in their act and moment. Around
us: loafs of Sierra Nevada mountains,
dark green with pines and firs. Canyon air

is thick with cicadas, dragonflies, bees, gnats,
and other bugs--corpuscles of energy whose
names I'll never know. Swollen knuckles

of thunderhead fists crowd an eastern sky.
There's a humid, thick, barely audible humming
of summer's abundance, of bright boulders

ringing with heat, a hum of hot southern air,
of soaked clouds about to blow up. Hammering
stops, saw stops: we break for water. The 

procreating butterflies relax. Their four 
antennae shift slightly as if nudged by breath
of a whisper. They shake the drowse 

of loving death from their rejuvenated
wings, rise and fly and depart this half-framed
human dwelling, and they join the inflamed air. 


circa 1981/2021 hans ostrom

Friday, August 27, 2021

Funeral in Los Angeles

Cancer took her quickly. Now
cars of her procession
move like dark cells through
traffic of the Los Angeles Freeway,
a daily purgatory.

A silver military jet
becomes a needle of glare 
that tugs a thread of chalky
vapor. The plane cruises
above faraway suede hills
well ahead of its sound.

And the family in its sealed,
air conditioned autos is driven
ahead of understanding.

A lavender dolphin, anchored
like a dirigible above a used-car
lot, smirks as they pass.

Her daughter runs a finger over
the upholstery. She thinks,
"It's just upholstery."
And at the cemetery, too,
everything has become
only what it is: asphalt, grass,
trees, people--the landscape
of a children's book.

Where they bury her,
upright headstones are forbidden.
Marble, granite, and brass must
be inlaid so tractor mowers
may keep grass immaculate.

Beneath a canopy near the dug
grave, the daughter looks toward
those old brown distant hills.
She wonders--as her relatives
whisper quietly and cry--why
the world seems to have been 
completely prepared for
the death of her mother. 


circa 1979/2021 hans ostrom