Gävle, Sweden Poem by Hans Ostrom

Gävle surprised me. It marched
out of my expectations looking like Garbo—
brusque, beautiful, never weak. Baltic air
struck like hammer blows. At the
Joe Hill Museum, they’d stacked Joe’s stuff
in a back room. A carpenter worked on
a rain-gutter. Next door two union-men
muttered into cellular phones, going over
figures. In America, where
Joe was not incidentally hanged,
Gävle became Galveston, put together
with gaskets, rivets, and wharves. It marched
west of expectations like Joan Blondell,
buxom, adobe blond, played broadly, wanting
no truck with mystique. Gävle surprised me
with its impossibly sharp air, its
organized gulls, its almost finished
Swedish museum in honor of America’s
most famous Wobbly.