108. Alpine Ride

Gus was my horse that day--"a known eater," said the wrangler, a cowgirl from Portola.

Horses and us--we picked our way through heavy timber, sunlight shafting through to illumine ferns nourished by springs.

From a clearing, we saw mountains higher than the mountain we here on. Horse-tails swished. Sweet odor of horse manure sometimes wafted. Then there: the painfully blue lake, exquisite and real.

Gus liked to sop and nip red heads of Indian paintbrush wildflowers; chew; snort. I let him eat, wasn't supposed to.

It was summer, we were riding a loop, and Gus had a sense of how pointless it all was. Alpine breezes pushed off the lake. I nudged Gus forward, past wildflowers down the the rocky, dusty, dry trail.

107. Red Cabins In Sweden

Summer cabins in Sweden are painted a singular red influenced by a mineral, copper.

When summer arrives, and the sun returns from its exile to Tierra del Fuego, one may be inclined to think one has earned this light, which collaborates with receptors in eyes and brain to send a signal: red cabin.

Red cabin beside a blue lake in Sweden. Yellow flowers beside a path. Shadows shifting in birch woods. Silver fish in the blue lake. Yellow birds on white/black birch branches. Custom and respite reside, implied, in the red-painted wood of a cabin.

The yellow clean hair of a woman, her children laughing, her husband sleeping in a chair outside.

The rest of the world isn't here, the woman thinks, nor is my job, nor are the bulk of my worries, nor the foul fatigue of Winter. Just far enough away, the sun isn't here, but its light and warmth are. This is the red cabin, she thinks. This is where it is and when it is, summer. This is Sweden, which isn't somewhere else, and I am resting.

106. Diesel

I've always liked the smell of diesel oil, even though I shouldn't--because it stinks, and because I don't know what "diesel" means.

The other day I was standing on a sidewalk in Tacoma, Washington, United States, when a large bus waddled by, giving of its diesel odor. There must have been something else significant in the air because the smell made me think of standing in Stockholm, and normally I don't associate diesel with Stockholm. Anyway I experienced nostalgia for snow, a certain quality of light, and a certain configuration of cold in Sweden. Indeed I named the experience "nostalgia" almost immediately even though I knew nostalgia has such a bad reputation that it's almost a sin.

Then a talker accosted me. He was the type of person who talks constantly to no one in a city, pretends to direct traffic, and otherwise carries on. He carried on to me.

"If you don't stop following me," he said, "you're going to get killed." I knew he was begging the question, but I also knew pointing out the fallacy would not be effective.

Unrhetorically terrified, I said, "Understood," and noticed the red woolen scarf around his neck. My heart-rate had accelerated, I noticed. I walked away. He came after me. "I know you're every move!" he yelled. He'd turned me into a coward. Apparent insanity, combined by such apparent aggression, has that effect on me and others. I went into a shop.

I told the proprietor, "That person is following me."

"Oh?" she said, and her face looked worried, as if I were the type of person who thinks people are following him.

"I don't know what to do," I said. She looked through the window carefully at him, his red scarf, his talking mouth, and sized up the situation.

"Go on down to the bus-stop and get on a bus," she said. "He won't have any money for the bus. Or he'll be afraid of the bus."

"Good idea," I said. Feeling obligated to her, I decided to buy something, so I purchased a small round tin container of a waxy, aromatic substance. I didn't know what one was supposed to do with the substance. Apply it to lips or automobiles? Apply it to a coiffure? It smelled like coconut. I wished she carried a kind that smells like diesel.

Followed closely by the man, I walked to the bus stop and waited while he upbraided me further. He appeared to be unarmed and chiefly a rhetorical assailant, so gradually I grew tolerant of him. Eventually a bus waddled up and stopped. I got on, paid my money, and sat down. The man's eyes followed me to my seat, and the last image I saw of him featured his yelling at the bus and me. I rode around for a while, thinking of Stockholm, and then I got off, leaving the tin of of wax on the seat.

105. Loading Words

Along the rust-brown flammable river stand warehouses filled with words. Most are sold to journalists and governments. I run the fork-lift.

It's a job. I'm not interested in warehoused words, crate upon crate, except as something to move for pay. I live with chronic grief for loss of words I used to love. They loved me. Apple, chevalier, pelican, chrome, banister, quince, brushings, and black--a few.

I don't know what happened. This is a way of saying I know what happened--and happens. We get worn known. The magic of words gets stolen--by whom or what who really knows? We agree to do too much for too little. We ask almost nothing of language, which becomes a plain gray tool. We stagger home in dark and wonder if the river will catch fire.

104. Red Machine

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(photo by Sheri Weinsheimer, used by permission)
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Hey, may I borrow your red machine? I heard it works, and I know it's clean. I got a job for that red machine.

When I show up at the venue in question, the site of toil, the job of work, I'll say, "Here I am--I'm ready to go," and your red machine will positively glow; it will let them know that business is what I'm intending to mean.

Thank you kindly for the loan and the use of your red machine, perhaps the best job-enhancer I have so far seen.

103. Beside Yourself

By firelight get yourself right. Leave ambitious illusions on a ledge out there in darkness. Stare.

The perfectly explicable insanity of flame--red, yellow, white, blue--cures you of your rational disease and passionate preferences, leaves you next to nothing and beside yourself where you belong.

By firelight, warm your face and hands. Face and hands. Think of the faces and hands belonging to those coming before you, arriving after.

Forget what you know about stars. Ignore the moon. Crouch. Watch fire.

102. Experimental Aircraft

Once there was a woman who wished she didn't know so many things for sure. She'd learned not to try to convince people of what she knew, for they believed they knew things for sure, too. Arguing fatigued her. Besides, eventualities would demonstrate what was true better than she could: this she knew, too.

For instance, her husband took up the hobby of flying small experimental aircraft. When he'd told her of this new pursuit, she'd said, "I love you, and consider the word 'experimental,' please. When a cook experiments with a spice and fails, the result is merely an unappealing dish. When an experiment in aviation fails, gravity wrecks." Her husband had scoffed. He was jolly.

Later, when he showed her a red aircraft of startling design, she knew the plane would fail--before takeoff, she hoped. The experimental aircraft simply looked too much like art and not enough like engineering to be competent in the sky.

News of the fatal crash shocked her though she wasn't surprised. She grieved deeply. There's knowing, and then there's experiencing. Several weeks later, an attorney informed her that although her husband had intended to purchase more life insurance, he hadn't gotten around to doing so. There was some insurance, some money, but not a lot, the lawyer said. Her husband hadn't secured her economic future.

"I know," the woman said. "It's the way he was, and it's the way things are." She didn't mention how she knew that, as the plane approached the water, her husband had said "I'm sorry" to her, as if she were in the cockpit.

The little red plane didn't have a little black box, so there was no recording of her husband's last words. This absence pleased the woman, for she'd always preferred the knowing over the proof, wisdom over argument, and information over events, which could be brutal.

101. Blueberries

She stored that peculiar summer in a closet. Breezes and creeks and crickets: she fit it all in that pantry.

Something smoky lingered lowly in flavor. She liked it and held back sugar.

She reminded her winter guests that red accounted for purple in dusk's sky.

The tongues of that December's dinner-party were darkened by blueberry preserves, as were the skies of that peculiar summer as they settled in the closet, which held her canning.

100. He Likes His Kitchens Dry

An avalanche roared down importantly the other day, all boulders, snow, and noise--a terrible noise. "Stop right there," I said, and it did. I told it all about the woman I love. The avalanche cried pebbles of joy.

The other night I threaded darkness through a needle and stitched the moon onto the sky. A gratuitous gesture, perhaps; anyway, to assembled onlookers, I mentioned I was among those counted as being in love, hence the fancy needle-work.

The river considered ignoring its red-clay channel to flood this fine town. No, no, no you don't, wet friend, I said. I'm cooking for the woman I love, and I like my kitchens dry, so stay within your banks, and thanks.

99. She's Been Thinking

"I've been thinking," said the woman.

"That statement begs for a witty retort," said her friend, also a woman. "But I can't think of one."

"How would you describe me?" the woman said. "--I mean, if you were writing a story in which an illusion of me appeared?"

"Black hair, shoulder length--straight but not morose. The hair, I mean."

"Can hair be morose?"

"Yes, but don't interrupt. Pale but healthy complexion--white, if you will. Figure--not willowy, but not oak or sequoia sempervirens, either. Taller than the average woman but only just. Blue eyes. A tendency to brood, unlike her hair, which is not morose, as noted. Clothed."

""'Clothed'?"

"Would you like to be naked in the story?"

"It depends on who else is there. You know me. I am shy. I'll say no. That's a good description. People can fill in the rest?

"You mean, like red lipstick and ears?"

"I'm not wearing red lipstick. Any lipstick."

Walking, they had reached a cafe, which smelled of course of coffee, and of cardamom, people, and snow. Outside, there was no mistaking Winter.

"People will fill in as they wish. Maybe lipstick, maybe not. Definitely ears. I've been thinking, too."

"About what?"

"About thinking. About all the past and current thinking humans and hominids, all of them, have done, are doing. The volume of thoughts--it seems unimaginable."

"Then don't try to imagine it, the volume."

"But it inspires wonder, the imagining."

"And?"

"And so, my dearest friend, I think I will imagine. If I can."

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.