Hans Ostrom’s “Interior Departments” opens with an impossible appointment: “I am the Minister of Leaves.” That first line fuses a governmental office with the natural world, as though trees and paper leaves share one bureaucracy. The speaker writes memos “in re: / deciduous policy” and strikes compromises “between the forest and the trees.” Blending legal language with a familiar proverb, Ostrom sets up a wry central tension: the living world cannot really be managed by memos, yet the speaker works inside that contradiction. The title’s plural “Interior Departments” hints at the double meaning. In one sense, it suggests the government offices that administer forests and public lands; in another, it points to the inner departments of perception and belief. The central idea is that this administrative mind—with its departments, policies, and promotions—can be transformed by something older and greener: song, rainforest, ancient timber.
The poem is built from three tercets in free verse, without rhyme, but its line breaks do quiet work. The colon after “in re:” delays the arrival of “deciduous policy,” mimicking the official pause of a bureaucratic heading. Similarly, the break in “I strike compromises / between the forest and the trees” places the act of compromise on its own line, as if the speaker is poised between two worlds. The first stanza has the clipped, almost deflating rhythm of office language, yet “deciduous policy” is strangely beautiful, joining the technical to the seasonal. The second stanza shifts from dry memos to music: “Someone in the Ministry is singing a song, / a green song as insistent and calm as / succulent leaves in the Amazon Basin.” The enjambment carries the reader from the idea of song to the image of lush leaves, and the sibilance—“singing,” “song,” “insistent,” “succulent”—makes the language itself feel dense and alive. “Insistent and calm” is also a small paradox: the song is both forceful and restful, like a natural process that does not need to shout. The “Amazon Basin” widens the poem from an office to a planetary ecosystem.
Key words do double duty throughout. “Leaves” means both tree foliage and pages of paper, so the Minister of Leaves presides over nature and text at once. “Deciduous” refers to trees that shed their foliage, which quietly turns policy into a reflection on loss and seasonal change. The proverb about not seeing the forest for the trees becomes a bureaucratic negotiation between the whole and the particular. The word “Ministry” carries both a governmental and a near-religious function, so the unnamed singer becomes part of a rite as much as a workforce. In the final tercet, “promoted” stops meaning a step up a career ladder and instead signals a release: “I am promoted beyond bureaucracies / of my own beliefs.” The speaker is not freed only from outer structures but from fixed inner compartments. Then the passive phrase “am carried / on melody” enacts a yielding, and the destination is not another department but “ancient stands of timber.”
That movement from memo to melody to old-growth forest is the poem’s significance. It is compact but not slight: in nine lines, Ostrom turns administrative language against itself, letting the calm insistence of a green song overwhelm the logic of policy. The speaker does not abandon the Ministry; he listens within it and is carried outward. By the end, the “interior” has become a deep forest, and the reader has been lifted from the office of fixed beliefs into a place measured in centuries rather than memos. The final phrase “ancient stands of timber” has a rooted, stately cadence, especially after the quick syllables of “bureaucracies.” The poem suggests that real change in how we see nature—and ourselves—may begin with hearing the song already present inside the structures we have built.