A used-book store is closing after twenty years, a hired man is sick in the bathroom, and the owner keeps counting stock. That is the unlikely scene at the center of Hans Ostrom’s “Oklahoma Is.” The poem opens with a blunt claim: “In Oklahoma and everywhere, despair / only makes life seem more unyielding.” Against that unyielding feeling, it proposes a better tactic—not false hope or grand rebellion, but “to signify that life / is what it is.” The examples start strange and comic: a lawyer should fly a pirate flag above the office, and a tattoo parlor should have the phone number 435-OUCH. Then the poem settles into the bookstore story, where the strategy becomes clearer. The owner does not rage at losing the store or pretend the sick laborer isn’t sick. He says, “Use the bathroom,” thanks the customers as they leave, resumes the final inventory, and runs errands. The central idea is that endurance can be quiet, even deadpan: acknowledge loss and mess, do the next small thing, and call that the truth.
The poem’s construction mirrors that flat, practical tone. There is no regular rhyme or meter; the lines are short and broken by enjambment, so phrases spill over in ways that mimic ordinary speech and the halting rhythm of a workday. The line break after “fly” briefly leaves the reader hanging before “a pirate-flag atop your office-building” drops in as a surprise. Likewise, the break before “your phone number to be 435-OUCH” makes the joke land after a pause. The syntax is built from conditional advice—“If you practice law... If you run a tattoo parlor... If you’ve owned a used-book store”—which gives the poem the feel of a list or set of instructions. Later, imperatives take over: “tell him,” “Wait,” “Tell him,” “Run your errands.” That steady command voice keeps sentimentality out and turns acceptance into something active.
Imagery does the emotional work. A pirate flag above a law office is a small piece of anarchy planted inside respectability; it tells passersby that the person inside knows the professional order is partly theater. The tattoo parlor’s number turns pain into a pun, as if to say that even discomfort can be dialed and handled. The used-book store is the richest image: a repository of old words and stories facing its final inventory, counting what is left after twenty years. The sick laborer’s “undeniable nausea” is bodily and unromantic, yet the owner’s response never becomes cruel or heroic—just practical and courteous. The phrase “fixin’ to get sick” carries an Oklahoma inflection, grounding the poem in a real speech community even as the opening claims “everywhere.” Key phrases accumulate quietly: “what it is,” “God’s-honest truth,” “remains,” “final inventory.” The word “remains” does double duty, naming both leftover stock and continued living. The closing line, “Oklahoma is,” leaves the sentence grammatically open, as if being itself needs no predicate.
What makes this poem significant is its refusal to inflate suffering into melodrama. It finds a middle path between denying despair and surrendering to it. The bookstore owner’s final errands are not celebrated as triumph; they are simply what a person does when most of life has gone away and some of it remains. That plain statement—“Most of your life has gone away. Some / of it remains.”—is the emotional core. The poem’s humor, its pirate flags and OUCH phone numbers, is a form of honesty, not escape. It suggests that life can be signified, marked, accepted, without being repaired. In a culture of constant transformation and improvement, Ostrom’s “Oklahoma Is” offers a quieter kind of wisdom: presence, inventory, courtesy, and the courage to admit that what remains may still be enough. The poem enacts its own advice: it does not try to make life more than it is; it simply says what it is, deadpan and plain.