Showing posts with label rural. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rural. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

The Mountains Taught

They protected you with danger,
those High Sierra Mountains.

Cliffs and snakes, rockslides,
flooded rivers, icy narrow
twisting highways, dirt
roads cut casually into hills,
hours between you and a
doctor or hospital. Chainsaws,
knives, guns, lightning,
freezing temperatures. 

Wherever you went, 
whatever you did, you kept
caution in your pocket
like a talisman. You quickly
came to equate useless
risk with lack of thought,
not with bravery. 

Hans Ostrom 2024

Monday, June 26, 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, April 21, 2017

The Collector

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 men
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 hate him yet.
Your friends think he’s a wealthy man,
a pirate maybe; they beg
their parents to let them come 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, he 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 axles 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.
You’ll get hold of it soon enough.


Hans Ostrom, from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006

Friday, December 5, 2014

"Big Laughter, Small Towns," Hans Ostrom

The very big laughter,
rude/unrefined,
in very small towns
around the world:
it springs, blooms, booms.
Cackling and crackling and thunder.

It needs to make too much of too little,
of nothing sometimes.

Big cities outlaw open laughter,
which is inefficient and free,
not a commodity.

In little out 'the way places,
which are litter left behind,
there's never enough that's funny.
Which is funny.

The very big laughter
in very small towns
might be accompanied
by stomping of boots
on boards, washed clothes
pinned to the wind, and a combo
of broken conveyances.

If you pass through,
laugh, too; not at.


hans ostrom 2014



Tuesday, March 25, 2014

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," by Robert Frost

We were asked to memorize this poem in third or fourth grade. Because we lived in rural snow-country, the subject-matter seemed perfectly ordinary, except by then, no one used horse-drawn buggies.