Hans Ostrom

In a wilderness of reasons
not to write, he wrote. Just wrote.
Each word was the belief
in the possibility of the next.
...

Let's lay down some lines for Langston Hughes
this day of news: 20 January 2009. A fine
piece of the dream's no longer deferred, though
the thought's occurred that Mr. Hughes
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Be the noble curator of your excellence, for
fate made you perfect. In all things, be precise:
standing, sitting, staring, walking, sniffing, eating,
sleeping, killing. Never look in mirrors,
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Today’s whether report
calls for increasing perplexity
in the morning hours,
followed by intermittent
...

Imagine you can consider all ideas
And images represented by all words
And numbers in all libraries worldwide.
Open the book of this consideration.
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Among the events occurring
in the universe today, one featured
a convergence of the life patterns
belonging to a salamander and me.
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Stone walls get the last word.
This wall, my father built.He's dead.
It stands.He hefted each rock, troweled
mortar, composed High-Sierra granite,
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News: a signature of flight
stays imprinted on blue-black strata
in Earth’s uncertain crust.
(Body long since gone.)
...

Some doors are made of wood,
and some of fear.
Inside, you hear
the knocking, wonder: Should
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The circle is the center of the game:
The trip from home to home; mound; ball.
And Baseball’s creed is O-penness: fields;
Gloves like birds’ mouths; past fences lies forever.
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The field of our day lay ordinarily
before us. Gravity and practice

tethered our thoughts
...

If you don’t have it, you
must need it, and if you need
it, we can feed it to you. You’re
free to buy what you want,
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Winter’s filibuster fades to mumbles.
The delegates are nominating Spring,
signifying their favor by piercing
soil with green digits. Birds work
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A politician's head swelled
and burst out of a televising screen,
crashing onto the floor of my room,
rolling to my feet, where it lay,
...

People have retreated
from the outside
of not having homes
to the inside of not
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The task of cafeterias is to feed large
numbers of people quickly. They are
not so different, then, from farms and
ranches, except the clientele is often
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They wait for me across the creek.
They look like shadows from this side.
One day I'll wade across to seek
The insubstantial. Petrified
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Sex is an excellent syllable, which
detonates meaning and is fillable
with much connotation. Of course
it conjures a deed done and conjugal
...

Someone's wearing the socks I almost bought.
I wonder how they're doing.

Does he, or someone, launder them well?
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He'd been at his place of work many years
when one day white ants swarmed
into his official space and climbed all over him.
They bit him, making red marks, stinging.
...