michael hogan Poems

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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It will come whether we are prepared or not
like a locomotive running off the tracks
crashing through the timbers of stanchions.
So I climb an aluminum ladder to the roof;
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- Seamus Heaney 1939-2013

There are no diggers today:
a small backhoe removed clotted earth the night before
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The word 'tiger' is a powerful word, muscular, even deadly. And this has nothing at all to do with any particular jungle cat. There was the tiger tank, for example. Also a boxer who moved quickly with a feline grace and what they call 'killer instinct'.
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There is much to recommend
staying where you are. Local
knowledge is the truest kind.
But the suitcase is in my closet once again.
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At dawn, doves unloosen the light.
Antiphonal echoes, vibrato from deep caves
lift us from sleep and our unformed fears.
Dustmotes linger in the air.
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There are mornings when the sound of rain on the roof
is as sorrowful as lost children
and the sky closes over your life without mercy.
To start the day requires more concentrated attention
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What is it about the sun
on a late summer afternoon
that speaks of loss
even when the day has been more than expected?
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It was not angels exactly
but something on the other side
brought us to this place
from which we can never fully return
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Those afternoons when the tendrils
of late blooming morning glories droop
against the whitewashed fence
and even the roses have lost the look of roses
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