98. Welder

You pull down the metal mask, peer through its window, lift a thin metal rod with pincers connected to lines. You're a knight who got turned into a laboring wizard-- in a union if you're lucky. The rod sizzles, crackles, flares, smokes--wants to become the metal it touches. You're unfazed by rain of fire. Tiny meteors of sizzling metal fizz and cascade.

It's all to create connections, fuse fragments, to lay a molten bead between two solids. Such a strange ceremony. The cloth around your neck, red, is soaked with sweat--layers below the other covering.

Such a strange ceremony.

Someone passing sees light flare against the window of your primitive mask, sees you crouched in midst of fire and noise, treats you like an executioner, scurries. After a while, you stop, peel back the visor, breathe and blink, having risen from the altar of Hephaestus. It's payday.

97. Red In Brueghel's ICARUS

Auden instructed me
long ago how to view
Bruegel’s Icarus and
note the white legs
between shore and ship:
such a small and pitiful
percentage of pigment
on the scape. Now
I’ve looked again,
rediscovered wonders
in the view: the sun’s
genial, obese collision
with horizon; fat,
billowed sails; a
diamond-shaped
apparition above
one ship; the supple
curves of furrows
at the farmer’s feet;
the sacred, mellow
light into which
the plow-horse stares.
And the only red
of the painting flares
in the farmer’s blouse:
how anomalous
and right. About red,
Brueghel was not
profligate but wise.



Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

96. Marx And Home Repairs

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(image: Karl Marx, reaching for his copy of the Manifesto)
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I imagine a window in Karl Marx's apartment going all wrong--dry rot in the sill, a crack in the pane, the framing so loose that Winter rides in on a howl and a whistle.

Marx has his wife hire workmen--two. One's a beet-faced beer-drinker with sausage-fingers and a bull's neck. Marx thinks this one's the carpenter, but he's the glazier. The carpenter's a thin, bearded, sallow fellow who takes measurements as seriously as scripture or theory and wears red suspenders.

The men bring an odor of sweat and onions to Marx's life. They tighten the window, which silences Marx's toughest critic, the wind. When it comes time to pay, Marx thinks the men charge too much. He quibbles. This is never recorded in dialectical history.

The men aren't surprised. Professors are tight with money--well known. Outside, putting their tools away in a cart, the men marvel at how many books Herr Marx owns. "You'd think one or two would be enough," says the massive glazier. "I'm told he writes about workers," says the slender carpenter. "What about them?" asks the other. "I don't know. Probably something fanciful."

"That window should last a while," says the glazier. They look up. Marx's wife is looking down at them.

95. Cherry Moles

The dermatologist calls them cherry moles and says they're harmless even if they look alarmist.

They are moles tired of living in a how-now-brown-cow-town, where everything from boots to diner-toast seems kind of, you know, ordinary, and the red sound of a siren is such a welcome change, and the mayor, Mr. Angioma, is deranged.

The cherry moles are ruby red and seem to mark special places on the skin's map; however, the skin's map points to nothing but itself, and you cannot use it to find treasure. It is no map in truth. It does not represent Duluth.

With a magnifying glass, the dermatologist travels across the country of the skin, sometimes stopping at a bright cherry mole and muttering, "Harmless."

94. Late Red Flowering

A few blue flowers cling to long stalks in October. The latest blooming thing, though, is an herb, a type of sage. Scarlet petals adorn its conical pods, which will release seeds on to cold November ground. I stare at the late disarray, a disheveled tableau of flowers and herbs gone seeding. My eyes water: an allergy to something, maybe, or a reaction to brusque breezes. Out comes the red handkerchief. I dab around my eyes so I can look again clearly at bright surprising scarlet petals, so vivid they're an irony as November's gray attitude approaches.

93. Sienna on Greens

In Danila Rumold's painting, Sienna on Greens (2006), we're invited to wander in color, where several bright leaves seem to hover over clay. We may stay at first impressions or go, not deeper, per se, just elsewhere or otherwise. Our eyes might focus on bluish ground-mist in an illusory distance, for instance. What we think when color occurs to us matters. It's no less futile than the rest, that is. When you see sienna, you may see clay in Sierra or nothing of the sort. A painting's like, and a painting is, and a painting goes as it stays.

92. Someone Hid Red

Someone hid red from the landscape, which remained ashen, blue, and brown all winter.

Red fallen leaves were composted instantly. Goodbye to color. Cardinals had migrated, and every rose was dead and blanched into an insufficient beige.

Finally, someone lit a cigarette. Its tip glowed red. The smoker puffed and smiled. He was an advance-man for Spring. He carried a sample-case full of possible red things. In his experience, Winter was a good customer, eager if not desperate for red.

91. Drought

Forgive us when we trespass into thinking drought's a curse. Fire makes it worse, feasting on dry grass, making us spend more water, turning sunsets to the color of blood.

A flash-flood now would slaughter each parched canyon and inundate our boulevards. We live between Too Much, you see, and Not Enough. Us: precarious. Forgive us if we speak to sky and ask to be forgiven, if we stare at baked clay and try to taste the air.

90. Writing With Students

I'm writing with students in a glass gazebo-cafe.

Four stainless steel fans overhead turn slowly like denatured propellers.

Pens sprout from the students' hands, which bunch into loose fists to spar with cursive.

An aimless cafe-song leaks from a speaker. The students get serious, leaning into writing, silently reading lines they've laid out so far, shaping this thing on a page called a poem.

One of the students sips from a green straw that descends into iced red tea.

89. Before The 6:12 Departure

A young woman wearing a brown coat and a red beret and carrying a briefcase scowled at an approaching rainstorm, entered a metro station.

A moving, shifting group of others hurrying toward transport to jobs absorbed her. Her body was among their bodies. She walked into the rest of her life.

88. Painted Toe-Nails

Why do women paint their toes, ten red squares (of sorts) in two rows; --beneath the paint, ten slightly plump and variably sized nodes of flesh that grip, relax, curl, relax, navigate, and nap?

I don't know why they paint their toes. I don't need to know. I just like the pleasure of asking. I wonder what persons in what cultures were first to paint the nails on toes. Maybe an anthropologist wearing sandals knows.

Properly speaking and properly painting, women paint toe-nails, not toes. Women are said to have their toenails "done." They participate in pedicures. Or they trim and paint their toes themselves.

And then the toes are free to glow, go redly in sandals or in shoes or in shoes, or unshod before God. Some women paint their toenails. This is good. All fine by be, toes glowing redly.

87. Red Undancies, Etc.

I left my red Iculous out in the sun, and I'll be a son of a gun if it didn't fade to pink, as if to ridicule me for my spelling error.

I think the red Efining moment of my life occurred when my mother birthed me into the hands of a country doctor.

The boss said we needed to red Ouble our efforts because, I guess, the accountants found out our efforts weren't sufficiently Oubled.

Frankly, in all honesty, and to tell you the truth, I am no fan of red Undancy. I like my Undancies to be blue, green, or black.

The documents provided by the Government were so red Acted that they'd become works of art, vast cold ponds of black ink into which facts had disappeared.

86. Queen of Hearts

Queen of Hearts, you are not needed. You have been feeding off of hate too long. Queen of Hearts, silence yourself, put your grudges on a shelf, go to good work, go into your heart.

Queen of Hearts, your era's ended, or let let us hope it has. Queen of Heart, Queen of Hatred, you're not needed. We have pleaded long enough for sensible and kind, for empathy, for mind; for mindfulness.

Queen of Hearts, you're not a fiction. You are fact. You act; more is the pity.

Queen of Hearts, you are not needed. Please relent, your hatred spent.

85. How Oxygen Loves Red

Each breath's a dose of oxygen, breathed from pink-red lungs.

When oxygen hits an open wound, sometimes the red blood screams.

When iron falls in love with air, the tragedy begins. Rust is evidence of oxygen's lust.

When lightning torches forest, oxygen goes mad, builds halls and towers of flame and wants to obliterate all dry and fibrous things with its red empire, voracious inferno.

When did oxygen's addiction to red begin? As early as when Universe exploded into being?

Today I saw something exposed to air too long. A red mold lightly dusted it, cosmetic and sinister. In a room somewhere, oxygen could be heard to chuckle. Then it danced through the ducts of a red brick building.

84. Red Lights In A Blue-Black Storm

When hard rain came again at night, pounding pavement and rattling roofs, slanting in at low angles, she parted curtains and looked out at relentless water, which hit the city--not her city but one in which she'd ended up, the way we do after we take this step, make that choice, get jostled by that or this accident or willful impulse; and as her mind absorbed the image, her gaze also saw red lights at a train-crossing, far off in that blue-black mass of night, so far off that they seemed sometimes to wink off, blink on, and she remembered, and she spoke quietly to the cold window made to creak by gusts, "Why do I let myself forget the mantra, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, I'm here, and here I am?"

83. Re-imagining Twill

An Entity sent "him" an email communicating the assertion that a retailer of clothing pretends to desire "to re-imagine twill."

Let us re-imagine twill, then, he thought: tillers and pickers of cotton; overseers of humans; workers in mills; diverters of water; bankers of loans; spinners of fiber; cutters of cloth; drivers of loads; sewers of costumes; sad sellers and buyers; the hours of work-grinding-work that were in fact counted but were in experience infinite and obliterative.

Imagine, re-imagine with me (said the man to his friend), the notion of twill, red twill, tailored, re-tailored, retailed, and emailed; red twill re-imagined in An Exciting New Look For the Fall.

82. Lois And The Greatness of American Poetry

Lois read where some noted assessor of poetry had opined that American poetry was in danger of losing its "greatness.'

She was relieved to know that, at least by inference, poetry from Mexico, Canada, South Africa, Sweden, Japan, Cuba, Iran, Luxembourg, and Egypt (for example) was going to retain its greatness.

Lois didn't, however, know what the man meant by "greatness," which she suspected might be a quality much debated in some circles, squares, and rhombuses, and which in most cases was a manufactured, illusory status, as it was in the case of soft-drinks, popular music, and vegetables.

Also, how (Lois wondered) would this fellow know about American poetry? Sure, he allegedly read a lot of it, but still, what percentage of all American poetry had he, did he, read? Not only hadn't he defined greatness, but his statistical sample was suspect, the greater sin in this Age of Stats.

Then, of course, there was The Dickinson Factor. Assuming we might agree on what greatness meant, assuming we could read all American poetry being written, some great American poetry might be getting produced by people who kept it to themselves, out of sight. Dickinson had loathed publication. She put her stitched-together books in drawers. She even wrote a poem mocking publication. And yet her poetry had been published, eventually, and it turned out to be great.

Lois suspected that the Noted Opiner might be a fan of such American Poetic Titans as Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Allen Ginsberg, whose poetry was like a train that announced itself as Great before it roared through town. After it roared through town, there were critics riding on the back of the caboose reminding the town that some great poetry had just roared through. Wa-hoo!

Lois believed several things about American poetry--and about poetry in general. She believed it was less concerned with its citizenship than people assumed. She knew of no poem that carried a passport. Second, Lois believed greatness was like a shuttlecock that critics batted back and forth on the sunny lawn of criticism, back behind the old-fashioned sanitarium. On the list of, say, three million things to worry about, "the greatness of American poetry" probably didn't rank higher than 2, 753,618.

Finally, Lois believed that if American poets--indeed, all poets--just kept using the word "red" from time to time, and well, their poetry would be just fine, "just fine" being a kind of breeding ground for greatness. "Shun not the word 'red,' poets": that was Lois's sage advice. As for the man who'd gotten a head-start on mourning the loss of great American poetry, Lois had these words of hidden advice: "Silly boy."

81. Sexy Wine Women

Light low, world pretending to be at bay, a few kind things to say: ah, dear, the rim of the wine glass is a lip of light, and someone has murmured something about sexy wine women.

Sexy wine women?

Sure, paint and wine blur, words and feelings. Our time and wine are full of light. Our light isn't full of time. Be comfortable. Have some wine. We're here whether we're supposed to be or not. The glorious rot, red wine. Your smile gives light an attitude, and light loves your hair, sexy wine woman.

VIDEO

80. Cabernet Franc

Found Poem: Cabernet Franc

The nose shows aromas
of plum, cranberry, cassis, and
pepper. The mouth is clean
and ripe, with youthful pie-cherry
red berries and plums
that are unencumbered by oak. The
tannins are well managed,
and the finish is fruity,
velvety. It lingers for
some time.

79. Blues In Three Paragraphs

Once there was a woman. A woman once was. Her name was given to her, oh yes, and she kept it. Here though she is She. She grew up into bewilderment, love, enthusiasm, disappointment, heartache, hard work, shame, loss, and affliction--in her specific life's, however, particular ways. Sorrow filled her days, her spirit, as darkness fills a lake at twilight--heavy but untouchable, deep and complete. And so she sang.

The Blues, her blues. Crudely, freely, authentically, often, and finally well. She didn't put her heart into the blues. The blues came out of her heart-so-to-speak like trout leaping out of a dark lake and shined on by moonlight. She sang of it all in a line, that line repeated, and a third line rhyming with the two.

One of her songs was about a red dress given to her by a lover; oh yes, a lover. Lover left. Dress remained. Impulsively she sold the dress for a lot of nothing because it hurt too much to wear the dress, and/or to keep it and not wear it would hurt, too. Yes, indeed. Red, red, said. Broke, broke, joke. Cry, cry, why? Confess, confess, red dress. She had the blues, and they had her. She sang those Red Dress Blues--well, well; and those blues and the singing made her feel good, let light into the lake. The blue lake.