Richard Ostrander 'Outside Of These Lines'

Do you hear the chanting of Zen monks?

A murmur of syllables echoing down

empty monastery halls? A token to take

a keepsake all these years, miles distant.

The quandary was carried on air currents,

growing weaker, barely loud enough to scratch

at the ear underneath a cadence of crickets

calling to mate on this cool June night.

The words, foreign yet familiar still, after

all these years wandering cold mountain

canyon lands west to the Gulf Stream to me

sipping juice on my front porch swing?

They're a comfort as I peruse constellations

Sorting the ones I know from those I don't.

That this is some postmodern koan could be

denied if viewed outside of these sixteen lines.

I tried to leave the desert.

Move up to this

lush landscape at 6,000 ft.

but it's 112 degrees.

The prairie grass withers without rain.

I should understand.

Understand it's your body not mine.

You must suffer 9 months

then the primary care giver

though I prefer Mother.

Should understand your needs.

I do, but it still hasn't rained.

Hey Dad, its 8:00 O'clock here. I'm sitting in the sun,

enjoying it before it climbs too high

and beats down like a hammer that hits your thumb.

The kind where the expectation expands with a terrible heat

just prior to the pain shooting from your arm to your brain

then slamming back into your thumb.

But I was never very good with my hands.

You knew that when we built the grape arbor.

It listed to the left before it finally collapsed a week later.

I've got a great view from my chair of the Flatirons

granite slabs stuck upright in the ground

with a wreath of pine trees. I wish you were here!

We could go hiking, maybe on the lower hills.

We would look down on the city

and farther east out toward the prairie.

But I bet your view from your mountain is better

west through the valley down on the desert

that ripples at midday like the swells of the ocean.

It must be nice to see everywhere at once

the wind blowing your ashes across the slopes

spreading your view further and further.

Maybe you'll get down here someday, the wind in our favor.

We'll look west over the prairie from the Flatirons.

Well, I gotta go Dad. Life goes on ya know.

But I'll be waiting, if the wind's in our favor.

Your Son.

4

From 23,000 feet up in the atmosphere
I can see both the moon and the earth's curvature
as the Loadmaster lowers the ramp and soon
I'll be going over the edge.
Mare Crisium is a faint blemish
on the red moon's face.
An upraised arm snapped into a salute
commands us closer as the bucking
of the aircraft creates a rollercoaster walk
that I have made numerous times
two hundred by last count to
simply do what few others would do
and stand on the ramp of an aircraft
at one in the morning or stand guard
all night near a phone for the sake
of the contented sleep of a nation
whose sophistry has shamed me.
A check of the M-4 carbine strapped
under my arm and the 80 LB rucksack tight
against my ass under a 65 LB parachute
are routine sacraments for this mass
of eight men who will hurtle themselves
back to the ground after which their
painted faces will float through
the foliage of the night
to an assembly point where perhaps
there's a warm ride back to base where
a cold one awaits the desert in our throats
and then the final liturgy of kissing my wife
good night at the end of this day.
But before I go home, I gotta go over the edge.

What's important ain't for sale

and stick to what ya know the least

you'll learn somethin that way

goes way back next summer.

I leaned on her southern drawl.

For all in tenses and porpoises

I prefer marine mammals to conjunctives

my significant otherwise wouldn't mind

storing up for a sunny day

no one ever saves for the good times.

There are aliens here among us

This walking on glass is great

for my day-to-day anesthesia

Sun light is reflected in the shards

and the sun is a gem that hasn't cracked

but burrowed for a wedding ceremony.

Liturgies are a sequence that exasperate one so

what if I still sneeze at the memory

of Roswell? The cordite smell still lingers

about the ears of corn in rows on her head.

These kids nowadays can't keep their pants up,

I never could, but that was before AIDS.

What do they think they're doing

here in our own immigrant nation?

God only knows and if he don't,

the aliens do a thing or two for charity

But where do you go if God is gone

to radio memories scattered about the airways?

Personally I prefer my aliens illegal and wet.

Let's somnambulate at length about this

as aliens syncopate the rhythm of the mind

to gershwin tunes on WKGRU

to can paint in five easy lessons

learn from the ancients in the desert

where aliens are jerkied on easels

for the galleries in Santa Fe.

South American Indians sing the collages

on the city streets to the Inca beat.

Constellations congregate at the gate

omnipresent at suppertime but I'm tired

of chinese, how about Vegan barbecue

or how to read a book using subconscious

connections slithered sideways on pages

turning out at street corners

for pugnacious punks on ecstasy

riddled with exclamations

of semicolons;;;

7
x

I helped win the Cold war

got a medal to prove it.

Single handedly burned shit

in Bahrain under the thunder of F-16s

flying through fecal smoke of honey pots.

With stood the spit

of a young college coed

as I walked through La Guardia

in my class "A" uniform.

It landed on top of my cold war ribbon.

She demanded to know

if I wanted a war, had killed Babies

raped, tortured and pillaged

third world villages

while she studied to be a nurse.

But I wonder if she likes

AIDS, colon cancer

and urine soaked sheets

the daily fare of hospice care;

if she knew about my soldiers medal

for saving the little life of a child

not much in the scheme of things

her world and the cold war.

And I still haven't washed my uniform

or her spit off my ribbons

her spit, the highest award of all!

Orange is worth writing about

The only color suffused with such light

of the sun

setting or rising.

Not like that of twilight

end of evening, beginning of morning.

And everyone writes of blue

Wallace Stevens

Charles Wright

"Lady Sings the Blues"

now some Euro Band

about a little blue man.

But blue leads to the black nightsky

where sleep awaits

like Poe says...

But within our new nihilism

we don't hate the black blueness

we wrap about ourselves

to ward off that empty chill.

It's not death we're afraid of

or the feeling of deserving.

It's orange

in its unyielding glare

its promise of life.

In paradise she creates crisis

pain is a sign of life for her.

It's all Death of a Salesman

and Mommy Dearest commercials.

It's a dichotomy of still

being in love w/ her

and would I do it all over again.

She's feeling so Sayonara

on Monday's molehill of catastrophes.

Six more days and she still can't stop

cause how could she ever cope

with a little quiet time.

What did you see blind old man

to slay your sex into that of woman

clear your ears for the speech of birds

a forbidden view of copulating gods

slithering forms of coital embrace

the pulse quickened the variation

the phallus fell back into its womb

became its tomb of seven years

here you saw both sides of sex

blinded for this painful wisdom

rewarded with the gift of future vision

the gossip of women turned prophecy

on your tongue told Oedipus

he's the brother of his son

told Thebes how to save its plight

even after life, your sight was sharp

to guide an Ithacan king on an odyssey.

A blindman to see such a sight

foretell a tale already told!