michael hogan Poems

Ice has been cracking all day
and small boys on the shore
pretending it is the booming of artillery
lie prone clutching imaginary carbines.
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Where it comes from is anybody's guess
but on a clear afternoon when
the earth is brilliant with its own shining—
Chinese lanterns of red maples
...

After a night of firecrackers and rockets
heralding a heavenly host and a child king
the dog and I walk out into the mist
where just before dawn the cold rises from the earth
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When her husband died she developed a fear of open places. It happened suddenly. One morning she walked outside and the world was one great vista. Trees were flying off in space. There seemed a mile of lawn between her house and the
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Dark and lugubrious, his eyes
signify no intent beyond brooding.
All day he has been posed on thermals
as if the land would rise like a hand
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for Lucinda

At the southernmost point the sun
stands guarding a place
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Not far from the Cooper River Bridge
this cornfield ends in marshland.
A solitary crow goes there and returns.
This morning, children from our farm,
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-Viña del Mar, Chile

Ascend those hills away from glitz of Malecón and Casino
where streets tangle around themselves and stone buildings
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Take this pen on your desk, for instance, or that chair by the window. Narrow your eyes until you see two pens or two chairs. Sometimes this can be done only at night or when you're quite tired. But once you see two of the object, say the chair, focus back to one, and now jump to two again. Do this several times. The chair will waver; it will ripple like cards being shuffled. Do not become frightened and make the mistake of holding to the belief that a chair cannot become other than itself. Instead flow with what you are seeing.
Let your mind accept that the chair is not a chair at all but a mere combination of light and motion that occasionally congeals into a chair then leaps apart into a frenzy of wood and fabric or ripples of dune grass from an off-shore wind.
The pattern of the upholstery swirls. It becomes the colors of your iris. It becomes brown with flecks of green, of gold. It becomes light which is the sun which is the color of blood inside your brain.
And the pattern of your present chemistry changes, too, with the light, with random combinations of molecules leaping synapses, with letting go and flowing with the chair, the way it moves until there is no chair but only you asleep dreaming of one which is first of all two chairs, then several, then your grandmother's lap and she is wearing a print dress, then your grandmother's mother whom you never knew but whose eyes were hazel or sometimes brown depending on what she was wearing and there were, your grandfather remembers, brilliant flecks of green, of gold.
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