All poems below: copyright  ©  Hans Ostrom. All rights reserved.

~ 

Rita Dove, Poet's Choice, Washington Post Book World, May 20, 2001: "Emily Dickinson and Elvis Presley in Heaven."

List of Poems (Alphabetical).  Numbers following titles refer to the order in which the poems appear below.

And Now, Whether (66)
Apertures (14)
April Primary  (3)
Author Falls Hard for a Minor Character, An (46)
Balloonist’s Log, Final Entry(1)
Cabin in Snow(59)
Closer Inspection(60)
Coast Starlight, The (34)
Collector, The (40)
Constancy of Once (16)
Counterpoints(61)
Dementia(68)
Dialogue on a College Campus (5)
Eight Freestanding Comparisons (8)
Electrician(57)
Emily Dickinson and Elvis Presley in Heaven (9)
Exiled Dead, The(56)
Expect Delays (20)
Fable: Noah and Raven(55)
Fossil of a Wing (48)
Four Four (18)
From Another Part of the Forest (35)
Generic Elegy(51)
Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robinson Jeffers in Heaven (10)
Grief for the Number Ten (12)
Henry James Holdings(67)
In the Sierra (36)
January 29, 1954, and Company (24)
Judeo-Christian Codicil(52)
Langston Hughes (45)
Leopard and the City, The(65)
Lyric for an Oval Window(50)
Lyric: Hands in the Wind (19)
Memo to Citizens (49)
Migratory Executives (43)
Mr. Brown(72)
No Uncertain Term (41)
Noblesse Oblique (21)
Nocturne: Uppsala, Sweden
Of Being (53)
Of Reticence (15)
Official Correspondence(54)
On Finally Understanding the Notion of a Happy Hunting-Ground(64)
On the Tour (26)
Paid Mourner (42)
Pebble in the Gravel, A (17)
Permission to Treat the Witness as Hostile (29)
Photograph of the Day Shift, North Star Mine, 20 June 1938, A (14)
Predicament ( 4)
Professor of Music (22)
Psychic Windows Washed(62)
Quiet  Child, The (27)
Remodeling(58)
Safe With Me (28)
St. Petersburg, Russia(71)
Salamander Confession (37)
Sea  Monster (47)
Sestina: Ellis Island/Amelia Earhart (39)
Sierra City. September (33)
Sierra Nevada: Cold Work Moment (6)
Sigmund Freud and Babe Ruth in Heaven (11)
Snow, Light, Work (25)
Social Security: An Introduction (23)
Spider Killing(2)
Story Problems(70)
Tornado in the Pennsylvania Hills (7)
Travelogue: Nevada to California Via Asphalt (32)
Trout in a Sentence, The (38)
Waiting Room (30)
Whereabouts Unknown (69)
Winter Nocturne (44)
Woman in the Iron Sonnet,  The  (31)

~

1. Balloonist's Log, Final Entry

The field of our day lay ordinarily
before us. Gravity and practice

tethered our thoughts
to checklists. Helium

swelled fabric beyond wrinkled
rainbow to painted light-bulb. Up--

and foreheads; then hats and coiffures,
quickly pigment on the landscape. Cheers

littered the wind. We thought
we knew the limits. But late

in the day the continent of air between
field and cloud shrank to an urgent isthmus.

The causes were final and cited
accurately. In the meantime,

we bartered in good faith with Earth,
starting with sandbags, moving through provisions,

ending with camera, compass, and hope.
Rapid descent reduced the gondola and us to ballast.

By the time the trees and rocks were close enough
to name, choice had changed to fate

at a predictable rate.

--Hans Ostrom

from Water's Night (Mariposite Press, 1994). Copyrighted.

***

2. Spider Killing

With two too many legs
and a gossamer treachery that stopped flies
and bound them in their own terror, spiders,
when I was younger, were to be killed.
The logic was unspoken but faithfully assumed:
insects were bugs; spiders, evil.

Wound a daddy-long-legs anywhere
and it would fall into a little pile
like so many broken brown threads;
the guts of a wolf spider stuck with a stick
oozed out creamy white like the center of a chocolate.

But now, on a Wednesday of nuclear-weapon tests,
nothing seems so uncertain as arachnicide:
while technicians subvert the arid, flat face
of Nevada, testing gadgets that melt planets in theory,
incinerate revenue in practice, I stand
in a steamy bathroom and debate with myself
the death of a spider poised on the perspiring
ceramic tile.

I spare him this time; then step
into the blasting shower and clouds of steam
pouring forth like fallout. The spider and I
stay in our steamed, vague corners
as Nevada's strata rumble
with the secrets of modern warfare.
The shadow of the Final War is a delicate cruelty,
strung across doorways and other passages,
sometimes stopping the mind and binding it
in a moment of terror.

"Spider Killing" won first prize in the University of Houston's "Harvest" poetry contest in 1978.  The contest was judged by Stephen Spender, and the poem was published in Harvest, volume 42, p. 9.   An interview with Stephen Spender appeared in the volume as well, pp. 6-7.  

* * *

3.  April Primary

Winter's filibuster fades to mumbles.
The delegates are nominating Spring,
signifying their favor by piercing
soil with green digits. Birds work
the precincts, natural politicians,

quick with impromptu speeches,
always groomed, crisply garbed,
well coifed. I support Spring. I think
it has a lot of good ideas.

Hans Ostrom
9/99

* * *

4.  Predicament

02/00

* * *

5.  Dialogue on a College Campus

6.  Sierra Nevada: Cold Work Moment

In a sense it's always winter

in this wooded county of our psyche
where my father and I build a house,
the rest of the crew off drunk somewhere.

The contractor has taken blueprints

and a cash advance to Reno.
A white sky pays out
kernels of snow. My father saws.

I nail. Partitions take ghostly shape.

In the forest of our days, coyotes
eat bread crumbs we scattered
to find our way back to where we left for work.

We lift walls into iron wind,

and brace. Ropes of snot come out
of our noses. Sierra cold's meticulous.
It polishes our eyeballs like a monocled jeweler.

One junco, round a musical note, lands on a board.

In this shift, we share a willed,
relentless push against work, which
is endless, more like Time than Time.

Our hands stick to metal we pick up.

Say in this work-moment that howling witches
fly down from glacial diorite Buttes.
Say maybe God leans closer or pivots away.

We're smaller than an echo of traveling geese.

I know my father in the white meadow of work.
Women have always been more sensible than men.
Up there on a ragged ridge a coyote yawns.

I feel as if we are the wages we are due.

Published in Ploughshares, the issue titled "West Real," edited by Alberto Alvaro Ríos, Volume 18, no. 1 (Spring 1992),  pp. 16-17.

* * *

7.  Tornado in the Pennsylvania Hills

On the morning after, I could not find
the driveway, and East was gone.
I tried to reinvent direction.
Where the north woods stood now
there was sky, a blasted space
our barn had entered.

Now out of hardship, we make board feet.
The loggers call to bid on damage.
Lithe trees stiffen, ooze
sap through splinters. They'll go
for suburban studs, veneer, chips,
paper for the memoranda
at the Bureau of Natural Disasters.

The twister took my words for terror
when it went back to sky.
In place of them I give our friends
bland facts: It sounded like a train.
It was 6 miles wide and 12 miles long.
We don't know how we're alive.

Now out of harm my wife and daughter
make tunes. Their simples songs
help us trust the calm again.
After tornado, the farm's afraid
to make a noise. After tornado,
our unassuming love seems loud.

Published in CutBank, volume 25 (Fall/Winter 1986), p. 36.

8.   Eight Freestanding Comparisons

Like a piano in the dark,
like white sea foam on black sand,
like a Russian novelist in the snow,
like white steam from the train
    hauling the Czar of Ego toward revolution,
like a blue pistol in an underwear drawer,
like bones under mud in a Peruvian forest,
like thunderheads over a Kansas cemetery,
like a bruise of ink on linen.

Hans Ostrom

3/95

***

9.   Emily Dickinson and Elvis Presley in Heaven

They call each other `E.' Elvis picks
wildflowers near the river and brings
them to Emily. She explains half-rhymes to him.

In heaven Emily wears her hair long, wears
Levis and western blouses with rhinestones.
Elvis is lean again, wears baggy trousers

and T-shirts, a letterman's jacket from Tupelo High.
They take long walks and often hold hands.
But she prefers they remain just friends. Forever.

Emily's poems now contain naugahyde, Cadillacs,
Electricity, jets, TV, Little Richard and Richard
Nixon. The rock-a-billy rhythm makes her smile.

Elvis likes himself with style. This afternoon
he will play guitar and sing "I Taste A Liquor
Never Brewed" to the tune of "Love Me Tender."

Emily will clap and harmonize. Alone
in their cabins later, they'll listen to the river
and nap. They will not think of Amherst

or Las Vegas. They know why God made them
roommates. It's because America
was their hometown. It's because

God is a thing without
feathers. It's because
God wears blue suede shoes.

Hans Ostrom, from Water's Night (Mariposite Press, 1994). Copyrighted.
Also published in the Sucharnochee Review.

 * * *

10.  Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robinson Jeffers in Heaven

People we see once: flood of faces, coats,
collars--on avenues and plazas, in markets,
theatres, bars, banks, hospitals. A

bent shape hoeing weeds: one
of us saw it once one place one
moment from a train: This

is an example but only of itself. Its
singularity cannot be transposed.
Imagine you remember the person who

interested you terribly in that café
that morning that city.
Sure it happened, but you don’t

remember because once was not enough.
People we see once: they are our lives.
Forgetting them (we must), we lose whole

arenas of the lived. Even ghosts return.
But not the populace of once-only-noticed
that composes the medium and matrix

of our one time here. We were adjacent
and circumstantial. We were just a jostle
of flux away from knowing next to

everything about their lives. The river of moments
took a different channel. That was all, is
nothing now. The once-only appear, then appear to go

to an Elsewhere that defines us. They
go on to get to know who they get to know.
Their lives are theoretically real to

us, like subatomic particles and anti-gravity.
To them their lives are practically real to them.
From their view, ours are not. We know they were

there, vivid strangers, because they always
are, every day. Like a wreath floating
on the ocean, memory marks the space

that marks a space. In large measure life is
the recall of spaces occupied. History
consists of someone who insists on being

remembered, someone who insists on re-
membering, combinations of. familiarity
and routine multiply, vie methodically,

capture places in recall. Vivid
strangers are incidentally crucial,
indigenous to an alien  moment that

is like mist over a meadow, rising, evaporating
just as we arrive. We remember
something in the meadow, but . . . .

***

17.   A Pebble in the Gravel 

Fly-fishing in the North Yuba River
offered miniature revelations.
They rose out of casting
and catching, wading and releasing;
out of breathing, walking, slipping,
falling, rising; from deepening dusks, darkening
pools. Sometimes the stream
clarified underwater gravel and boulders;
whorls of debris appeared as if
magnified: and a trout came up,
stared at duplicity, declined. Water
returned to its blurred blend
of liquid window, liquid door.
Sometimes a hatch of gnats
exploded into existence--its own,
mine, the canyon's, Earth's. Or: suddenly
a snake.  Or: a deer, staring, black
nostrils flaring. Or: kingfisher, ouzel,
hawk, robin.  Bat. Or: one's awareness
of one's self as a loose knot
of ambition, instinct, appetite,
motor skills, boredom--together cast
briefly over water, offered.
Sometimes the stream
roared quietly, mumbled forcefully,
and against such sound (North
Yuba, North Yuba), awareness
of one's thin, tentative presence
in presence might rise briefly,
leap, re-submerge.
                                                                --Hans Ostrom

* * *

18.  For Four

It's the only number
I've befriended. Others see
it as sailboat or
tree. I see it
as a sentinel in
the snow, a draftee
more lost than zero,
more alone than one.

Circular and disorderly, I
love nonetheless angles, geometry.
I spent summers truing
four corners of foundations
with my founding father.

Four's the only number
that romanced me; it's
the beat, the measure,
the box, the square.
Quarter and quarto, quad-
rangle and corner, a
small number always big
enough to house itself.

--Hans Ostrom

* * *

19.  Lyric: Hands of the Wind

Dust of a million builders’ bones
   Informs the wind with grit, lingers,
Then scrapes with unbelieving fingers
   Familiar blocks of hand-hewn stone.
                                                                --Hans Ostrom

* * *

20.  Expect Delays

21.  Noblesse Oblique

In a plaza between recall and oblivion,
we detect synthetic echoes in fog.
Do I know you? we mutter to faces out
of focus. The question, genuine, is a little
scary for everyone involved.

Dear remembered pieces of a party!
In memory's muddy creek, they
sink like sodden twigs. We were
so vivid then. We had been taught
to believe in verbs and nouns but found
life to be prepositional.

Not only am I as surprised as
the next person by my weeping,
but I find I am the next person--my
casual own acquaintance, to whom I have
little to say. To behave politely toward
oneself--what a subtle, circuitous curse.

Hans Ostrom

* * *

22.  Professor of Music

A gentle man with a cynical heart,
fragile brown eyes, and worn-out lungs--
composer, teacher. He hurries

to finish the final nocturne.
Fall is almost too beautiful
to bear; sunlight surges like
Chopin's measures. The composer says,

"When you are dying, people
change toward you. I haven't
been able to sleep. The doctor thinks
I am afraid of not waking up.
He gave me something to take that helps."
                                                                        --Hans Ostrom

* * *

23.  Social Security: An Introduction

* * *

1

World says,
"Why don't you do more,
be more, say more?
Be louder!" says World.

The quiet child eats this shout.

World says,
"Answer me!"

Metallic wind blows across
a dark reservoir
of the quiet child's speech.

World wants to know:
"How can you if you don't,
if you don't stand up, how
can you expect for yourself
if you what do you expect?"
World's language ceases to be
speech. It becomes a menacing
sky, weather to fear.

I expect, the quiet child thinks,
more shouting and questions
all my life; noise to negotiate.
Noise, a continent to traverse.

2

Opinions crowd against the glass
of the quiet child's inner world.
Mean lips. Muffled commands.
No matter what the crowd pretends
to want, it only wants in.

In most talking, all arguments,
many polite questions,
the quiet child hears
a menacing whine
& the cold whir
of an identity-eating machine.
To interrupt, to determine
terms, to subdivide
silence and create private
language property: these
are conquests & dominations
the quiet child sees
in what he's forced to hear,
in what she's made to understand,
to stand under.

3

The quiet child starts to speak.
Mouth is a dry cave
littered with bones of battered selves.

The quiet child starts to speak.

Inside a rage screams, louder
than tornado. It picks up
all the houses in which the quiet
child was trapped, hurls
them against Sky.

Sky on a still day choked
with humidity; sky that will not,
sky that cannot rain.

Quiet child
starts to speak, but only gulps noise of the world.
Chews noise. Swallows it. Keeps Mouth shut.

4

There is a person within each quiet
child whom the quiet child tries to protect

from shouts and manipulations,
from sarcasm and slaps, from

quick, clever demeaning arguments,
verbal slashes. That person inside

is the only one the quiet child
believes to exist. All other persons

are forces and masks, uniforms, electronic
images, shifting shadows, abusive shapes.

All other persons are signs that need
reading. Quiet children learn to read

early but never trust speech.
They listen as if listening were breathing.

The quiet child's only instruction on how
to protect the person inside comes from

instinct--a signal sent by an invisible
ship on an ocean of consciousness.

Often the signal's faint, hard to hear
above the malignant din

that seems always about to swallow
the person within each quiet child.

5

The forest is the forest of noise.
The fears are the fears of being abandoned
to noise and of being overpowered in the forest.
The path is the child's belief that he, that she
has the right to walk the path.
The beast is the beast of need.
The ogre is ogre of seduction and betrayal.
The lake is the lake of risk
across which the child must swim
to find the path again.
The stone is the dark stone
at the bottom of the lake
on which is carved the image
of a quiet child. Victory is not
victory. It is hope in the form of seeing
other quiet children walk out of the woods
to help the child out of the water,
bring the quiet child toward a fire, and food,
and the kind of listening that welcomes
the quiet child's speech.

6

Something the quiet child said:

"Peach orchards. A path through tall,
blond grass. A stack of flat stones. I
cherish these. . . . Hello? I'm calling
long distance. The lines stretch far
into a blue-gray stone. Trucks in there
haul vibrations of my speech. I talk
and you listen--a commonplace, I know.
But to me it is as breathing is to a person
who stopped breathing almost forever. Belief
is a skill I have not mastered. Doubt
is my favorite sweater. Fear is a heavy coat
I keep in a closet. Goodbye--for now."

--Hans Ostrom

* * *

28.  Safe With Me

I forgot the secret you
trustfully told me. I
didn't keep it; otherwise
I would have it: facts
are facts. Maybe one day
it will wander back to
memory. If so, I hope
I'll remember it's your
secret. I hope I will
remember you. Knowing
you, I am sure it was a good
secret, crucial in some way.
At least I sense a residue
of its importance, its private
luster perceptible in gray
ash of forgetfulness.

Hans Ostrom 9/99

* * *

29.  Permission to Treat the Witness as Hostile

I  refuse to answer
on the grounds that
language is terribly
imprecise, and that
whosoever swears to
tell the whole truth
(as I was just compelled
to swear) by definition
lies.

30.   Waiting Room

The room waits for us
to move through it. Magazines
collect like silt. We try
to collect each other's thoughts,
fail, return to our own. The waiting
room is quieter than most places
of worship. A door opens too rudely.
A caller of names holds a file, speaks
a name too brusquely. One of us
gets up. No one says goodbye or
good luck. Like birds on a roost,
we settle back too quickly into waiting.
The world cannot end as long as
there are waiting rooms. That
would be too dramatic.
                                                        --Hans Ostrom

* * *

31.  The Woman in the Iron Sonnet

Rooves of old barns bled rust. Yellow
wildflowers. Chilcoot, Loyalton (once called
Smithneck), Sattley, Sierraville, Bassetts Station,
Sierra City. Hawks and swallows and lumber trucks,
alder, doug-fir, blond granite.

***

33.  Sierra City.  September

Two hours before dawn your eyes open
and you tiptoe across cold linoleum
to check the thermometer outside: the thin,
red capillary's clipped down to thirty-one.

After breakfast you glance at your father's garden;
it's going underground: carrots and a few potatoes
duck the frost. After last night's freezing, leaves
of tomato vines curl and harden like arthritic hands.

From the kitchen in the afternoon you watch
your father in his dying garden, oak boughs already
yellowing and tossing all around him in northerly gusts
as he patiently surveys the damage.

When you see his cotton shirt pulled taut across his back
as he stoops to pull a carrot, you try to steel yourself
against a quickened fear--perhaps
by counting the last tomatoes line up

to ripen on the window sill: an even dozen,
and most of them still apple-green. But as you count
the twelfth, a pang of fear chills you
into glancing back at him: for a moment

your mind staggers in a solstice
where you the son think a father's thoughts
to your father: Get inside Quick come inside.

Published in California Quarterly, no. 16/17 (Summer/Fall 1980).

* * *

34.  The Coast Starlight
         (The train from Seattle to Lost Angeles)

(1)

California's Valley, expansive as an arctic icefield, drifts by. We see our groceries splendidly unharvested but organized like infantry: rows of lettuce heads cling to dark soil; cattle admonish flies and mull over the cud they've made of alfalfa; orchard-row spacings burst for instant into view as clean and true as spokes.

The ride rocks and shakes and shoves us.
Our nerves extend and probe for sleep
but cannot quite take root.

But even in such agitation,
we are attentive to small destinations,
and well before a porter sings a name,
we anticipate a billboard or a water tank
proclaiming that we will pause in a town
renowned for a single crop grown well
or for a company that bottles vanilla
or for the World Tractor Pulling Championship.

(2)

Out where cities are zoned Industrial and Dark,
we tiptoe our absurd mass on diminutive casters
and come in wailing, as if to warn and surprise
somebody both at once.

We scrape and squeal along each city's battered edge
of burnt brick and corrugated iron:
heaps of car husks, warehouses nearly rusted through,
alleys inflicted like dirty wounds--

out where bums wrap themselves like weapons
in newspapers and oily rags and stare yellowly
into our yellow windows and warmer faces;
where in the morning children with wise faces

hover for a moment on bicycles to wave,
or simply stare from backyards and corroding playgrounds
of neighborhoods that rot to nourish mudflats
and monstrous blackberry patches;

where the hand that's not a fist
scrawls rage and wizardry in spraypaint.

(3)

Finally Los Angeles,
overrunning its guardrails,
its empty concrete riverbeds bleached white.

We sit more rigidly, begin to fidget,
but seem unready for this Los
Angeles, this fact
taking sun in its brown concoction.

On blond knolls that waver in the heat,
grasshopper-pumps suck oil patiently from the desert's glands.

When the train stops,
we see ourselves reflected in a pool of water
on the concrete of the depot;
we hold on to this medallion of water
in this waterless Jerusalem,
a city in desperate sprawl
between Pacific and Sierra,
houses gobbling orange groves and meadows.

Our burnings shape the sky into a pumice stone
that grinds our oxygen and polishes our prayers
as we pray to be alone and separate
and someone other than the one-billionth Angelino
stepping from the train into Los Angeles.

Published in Cumberland Poetry Review, Volume 2, no. 2 (Spring 1983).

* * *

35.  From Another Part of the Forest

How are you today?
Ten dead fish float in the harbor.

May I help you?
Five cattle lie in the shade.

Won't you please sit down?
A bobcat rakes a deer's back.

Do you love me?
A butterfly folds up its wings.

What are you waiting for?
Seven geese waddle toward a pond.

Are you sure?
A toad jumps from a hot rock into shade.

Published in Poetry Northwest, vol. 28, no. 1, Spring 1987.

We happened upon a bear-tree:
a hollow log huge as a cave
that stank wildly of fur
and the quick animal's sluggish season.

There were other anguished clues
nearly everywhere--a woven bird's nest
blown out of a tree; a sapling
rubbed bald and shiny by a buck in velvet;
red ants having at a snake's dead white belly.
In the woods there's not much for us to decide.

When we caught a whiff of the bear-tree
and peered into that exotic sleep,
we knew such beasts know not much more
than to be furiously what they are.

We like comfort too much
truly to wish that we had
their wild forms and pure identity;
when we find sign of fury, though,
or witness an animal's original patience,
we are enticed. When brush quivers with animal
motion, when an owl floats imperially
through a grove of oaks
with a rodent on its hooks,
we might long for what we are not.
At such moments we are what we are.  

Published in the Laurel Review, vol. 19, no. 1, Winter 1985.

* * *

37.  Salamander Confession

It's been so long since
I've seen a salamander.
I'm wistful for those suction
feet, explorations of a dark-moss
creek. Back then we needed
our skinks and lizards,
our snakes and ant lions.

Something was always eating
something and we got there in time
to watch. I can't get over
how dull careers are, how
there's nothing but
humans in the buildings
of our time. No wonder.

Published in Jeopardy, volume 26, Spring 1990.

* * *

38.  The Trout in the Sentence

I was accustomed to trout in streams, silver
     ingots in green channels.
The trout in the sentence surprised me--
     a noun with black moles and a rose
stripe. It breathed with a patient, hinged
     rhythm. Its fins steered pressure of syntax.
Its eyes searched idiomatic debris.
     Then I saw countless phrases traveling over clean
gravel and blue bedrock, strata of grammar.
     My eyes followed the current to where meaning
eddied. Curved in air like blade,
     the trout suddenly once a gain was, and was gone.

Published in Jeopardy, Volume 26, Spring 1990.

* * *  

39.  Sestina: Ellis Island/Amelia Earhart

Where confounded tongues once tried to voice
Just two or three good words to start New Europe,
Now only pale Atlantic sunlight from Winter's sky
Articulates the warehouse-like dimensions
Of Ellis Island. Still it's easy to think
Of the immigrants' din speaking to new lives.

Ellis Island held completely possible lives
In a way one imagines a pale Pacific sky
To hold Amelia Earhart beyond returning. Think
Of public relations, fronting Putnam's flight to Europe,
Posing as an aviatrix in brown newsreels, no voice,
Waving from a wing, ready to fly into her era's New Dimension.

For her real flight may have been a private dimension:
At last to rev, pivot, taxi; to sense over-coated lives
Beneath her dissolving like a cloud of insects or like a voice
Passing on the street. After pretending to fly to Europe,
Was it fame and Putnam that kept her flying, or a sky
That widened into a world where she might act and think?

Morbidly we imagine last moments. We think
Of panic, hacking engines out of fuel, two lives--
Hers, the navigator's--woven in the phony flight to Europe,
Now unraveled in that absurd,  peaceful dimension--
A terrible, graceful glide toward gray waves--the voice
Of Navy radio speaking to a dumb Pacific sky.

American Icarus? Rejected by simple physics of sky?
Sure, and mythic because she's lost, not drowned. Lost lives
Speak with that sweet phony unheard voice
That Keats heard in the urn; it comes from that dimension,
Possibility, which we think of when we think
Of Ellis Island and America, sirens speaking to Europe.

We may think of a public-relations flight to Europe,
Of real crashes, hard ends to hard lives
In a world which kicks, thus proves, its three dimensions.
Nonetheless, what convinces like a dream is a sky
Abruptly vacant, a silence, an image: we think
We are transmitting. We think we hear Amelia's voice.

When I think of her voice lost to sky, it's as if the lives
Of all our physicists should bend to prove the dimension
That claims her and that still builds the Old New Europe.

Published in Intro 10 (Hendel & Reinke Publishers), 1979.

* * *

40.  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 me
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 yet hate him.
Your friends think he's a wealthy man,
a pirate perhaps; they beg
their parents to let them come on 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 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 axels 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 for now. You'll get hold
of it soon enough.

Published in New Delta Review, vol. 2, no. 1984.

* * 

41.  No Uncertain Term

I would like to have a word
with you. It is apricot.
It shall determine our exchange.

Confiding apricot, I shall lean in
and murmur. You shall pose
as one who understands.
I will have a moment of your time.

There's something I've been meaning.
To tell you. Apricot, I tell you.
Apricot, I say. Apricot, you realize.

Published in New Delta Review, vol. 17, no. 2 (2000).

* * *

42.  Paid Mourner

Grave-diggers unzip a pocket in Earth.  A minister
pronounces sentences over the soul. Me,
I'm here to tend to the business
of memory, to seem solemn, to regret.

I do regret. His last years
were friendless. His own body
became a cold acquaintance. No one
in those years spoke his name with care.
No one was left to care about the life
that had led to the end of his life:
days spent in close "rest-homes,"
where attendants moved him from shade
to light to shade.

Even before the first shovel full of red
dirt lands with a knock on the box,
we professionals walk away from his grave

In this dark bar, I loosen my black tie,
bring blond beer to my lips.
The bartender knows where I've been and
that I was paid to be there.
He can't kick me out but doesn't want me here.
He slaps down change, walks
to the far end of the bar, lights
a cigarette. He is living his life,
looking away from his only customer.

Published in Cream City Review, vol. 11, no. 2, 1987.

43.   Migratory Executives

They waddle out of conference rooms
in monoliths downtown. They take
elevators to top floors
of their buildings, nervously crowd
steel steps leading to rooves.
Once on each gravelly rooftop,
they drop their briefcases, slip off
loafers, flats, or heels, unbutton collars
run awkwardly to the edge, and take flight--

catching updrafts from urban canyons,
banking out over the gray harbor at dusk.
They feel an intuitive tug of magnetic North;
can smell green marshes
a thousand miles away. Their wool
and Dacron and Rayon clothing flaps furiously
in exquisite upper air. Their noses
are blue, their cheeks flushed, eyes
rinsed and fierce.

They are over farmlands now:
it's early morning, next day. They see
sunlight illuminate green and gold rectangles
of wheat and rice. They gossip excitedly,
gather their executive V more tightly,
begin to speculate about profits
to be found in summer feeding grounds.

Published in Cumberland Poetry Review, vol. 5, no. 2, 1986.

44.  Winter Nocturne

This is still unbroken country: granite
that buckled a million years ago,
diorite boulders, manzanita--and the coyote,
as lean and sharp as death itself.

I think of the ridge in darkness--
ponderosa pines creaking like the beams
of sunken ships. If you think about
a slab of slate beneath the snow,

you are glad to be in bed,
three blankets toward sleep.
It can be that simple:
a winter night in the hills allows

a luxury of plain choices,
whether to freeze or not.
Out there the bear's brain sleeps.
A coyote cries like a victim.

Published in South Dakota Review, vol. 21, no. 3, 1983.

45. Langston Hughes

In the wilderness of reasons
not to write, he wrote. Just wrote.
Each word was a belief
in the possibility of the next.
Kept it going. Many of his days
and words talk quietly. Mention is what
they do in this world of self-convinced
noise. Truth mentioned can be a sweet
brass note you'll never forget. Writing,
Hughes showed writing to be
an unashamed act, one of the few
in a shameful, shaming world. Words
grin. They protest. They reside. Words
throw a meal together for unexpected friends.
Words come back from long sea voyages
alive. Words aren't everything and sometimes
seem like the change left from
a last dollar spent in Paris or Reno,
Joplin or Port-au-Prince. Ah, it's
morning: the world goes to its
terrible work of silencing souls. Out
of an open window comes a tapping--
the tick, the tack, the click and the clack,
Jack, of writing. Look, those sorry rooftops
get red, get glad, get suave, get saved.

Published in Water's Night: Poems by Wendy Bishop and Hans Ostrom.
Grass Valley, California: Mariposite Press, 1992.

46. An Author Falls Hard for a Minor Character

I first noticed her in early scenes with
the hero. She was unremarkable,
there solely to get him
believably from point A to point B.
It was supposed to be geometry.

Now the hero’s been in a bar
in the fourth chapter for a year.
Might as well write a scene where an ambulance
wails down a wet street, coming for him.
A telephone rings in the novel.

She walks across a room
to answer it. It’s me. I tell her
I’ve thrown it all over, all those
other lives, given up all plots for her.
I ignore how idiotic I sound asking

"Where would you like your life
to take you? What kind of smile
shall I invent for you." She says,
"Oh, you shouldn’t do all that for me."
There’s something in her voice

She says goodbye, replaces the receiver,
gently crushes out a cigarette. I write,
". . .crushes out a cigarette . . . on the screen,
hate it. I can't stop. I write badly and
only to find out more about her.

47.  Sea Monster

48.  Fossil of a Wing