Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Bookshelves

In a musty library room
in a friend's old abode,
dark wooden shelves,
floor to ceiling, look like
rows of secrets, willing
to be opened like gates
and doors and windows
and minds. To reach

for one book, clothbound
with no dust jacket, and 
take it from its snug space,
fulfills a desire. For what?
You don't entirely know,
do you? But there it is,

the book, quiet and pliant
in your hands, centuries
of the printing art floating
invisibly behind it. The rest
of the books on all the shelves
and walls look on,
like spectators at a stadium--
but they're the quietest
audience ever. A clock's
bell dings, softly, softly. 

Hans Ostrom 2024

Sunday, January 26, 2020

Books on a Bed

A small pile of books on a bed.
Six paperbacks, one hardback,
all used, handled. Not so different
from beach debris. Here, says the sea,
here are some stories someone
dropped inside me. They're free.


hans ostrom 2020

Saturday, August 17, 2019

Seeds in My Bed

Dark brown seeds
in my bed. From bread.
(Bed is a place for sleep,
books, and sex. Beyond
these three, life does have
a few other highlights.)

The seeds look like tiniest
canoes. I'm going to sleep
beside them because I
am not moved to tidy up.

I won't have the recurring
dream of lying flat in a canoe
and floating down a river,
night, many others floating
in their canoes beside me.

The river rivers me
toward a sunny place where
people seem okay and help
me ashore. Because the

brown seeds made me want
to dream that dream,
the law of dreams will not
let me dream it. Goodnight.


hans ostrom 2019


Monday, April 23, 2018

Solitary Book

She's a solitary book. She
wants a shelf all to herself.

She's well printed inside
and bound with a durable,

beautiful cover. She's full
of ideas, pathos, and humor.

Sometimes she invites me in.
There it is a local heaven.

From her name and table
of contents through to the

colophon, back and forth
I go along innumerable paths,

knowing her story in some
of its endless ways. It's never

long before she sends me away.
She likes a shelf all to herself

and is most comfortable when
closed.



hans ostrom 2018

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Note to Shelf

Note to shelf:
keep up the good books.
I like their looks,
if I do so say myself.



hans ostrom 2016

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

"Inside Your Poem"

Climb inside your poem. Cool as a cave
it is. Cool and luminous. Invisible
aromatic tapestries hang
from curved beams carved out of marble.
On the ceiling, images roll, shift, crash,
and recombine like the surface of surf.

Yes, and the lustrous bodies of dancers
in there--the music, the spring-water,
the food! In muted sectors elsewhere
in your poem, stone shelves carry books,
many of them full of poetry that, outside
your poem, has never been seen. Your
poem contains rare verse! Write

your way deep into cavernous
passages. Draw on the walls.
Listen and sing. Dream and tell.



hans ostrom 2014




Wednesday, April 16, 2014

"Discreet Books," by Hans Ostrom

Old books, discreet, keep what now
seems naive, quaint, or embarrassing
enclosed, hidden in stacked pages
between covers. Replayed TV episodes

lay bare what's now funny
for the wrong reasons. They
show how the writers
sank their lives into a wicked,
remunerative genre bound
to betray them as now

they sit in fine houses,
their bodies ravaged
by the stress of the Industry,
looking at the spines
of novels they've collected.

Faint noise of grandkids
splashing in the blue pool,
Hollywood hills, reaches
the interior, paid for
by residuals. It was,
it is, a living, and as Sam
Johnson said, "No one but
a block-head writes
for anything but money."


hans ostrom 2014