A Vivid Rainbow Poem by jim hogg

It came upon me gradually,
a long delayed reaction to
what seemed like minor slips that night -
in winter many years ago.
My ego and my ignorance,

were glory bound or so they thought,
on notions that made little sense,
derived from all I knew of love:
much less than I felt for myself,
but didn't realise it then.

Her hair was black, her eyes were blue
she lived just yards across the street.
we sat together back in school,
when we were only ten years old:
the classic childhood sweetheart trope.

It never quite got off the ground
'til late in nineteen seventy.
Through ups and downs we somehow wound
our way to something pivotal,
a make or break appointment in

a Morris Oxford motor car,
before the end of seventy three,
a street away from where we'd met.
It didn't really go to plan:
a single kiss, some civil words

some witless words, and then goodbye.
She exited the car and walked,
and that was all 'til Janet's Lounge,
where she was shaping up to wed
a guy I knew, and I was with

the butcher's daughter and a friend.
We swapped fond glances all night long,
more sweet than bitter I recall,
and then at closing time, an end
to what I'd seen as destiny,

a love no severing could thwart.
Without a touch, without a word
we parted, and the dream was gone.
And so the other dreams began,
the kind that seemed so real they kept

their vice-like grip for days on end
- a stunning aftermath I hid,
for speaking up just didn't fit.
In time the gap between them grew.
The flame burns up, the flame burns down:

a very inconvenient truth
when love is young and hopes are high,
when beauty peaks and wilting looms.
We make our choices and endure
the challenges the future springs,

but underneath the fronts we see
flow deeper currents, secret things,
that lie in wait, or drive us on.
I wasn't blind enough to miss,
the urge to leave my second thoughts

and reconstructions of the past,
as far behind me as I could.
And there were other matters too:
my urge to match my father's heart,
as I'd misread it in my youth.

And so I sprinted off towards -
although I didn't know it then -
concerns I meant to leave behind.
To bolster my escape I built
defences that would serve me well,

for more than thirty years in which
I lived an ordinary life.
I trialled myself against the sea:
between the peaks beneath the nest,
where Ravens soar above the cliff;

in twenty feet of breaking wave
off Portavaddie's stony bay;
or wholly in the hands of fate,
I hurtled headlong at the rocks
on Laggantulloch 'til my luck,

again saw fit to thread me through,
just as it did through all those years,
as life pitched all the normal stuff
that ordinary people face:
a broken marriage, broken plans,

two kids with broken dreams and hearts,
and somewhere in the midst of that
a new beginning that survived,
despite the branchings of the past,
'til middle age and selfishness

(like vanity, it never quits)
just squandered everything we had.
But after that, a reckoning:
the unexpected yesterday
came lapping all around my mind.

That black haired, blue eyed girl I'd known,
full forty years or more before,
erupted from old memories
with energy to spare it seems,
compelling me to write myself

straight into on-line infamy.
A castle of commitment raised
in sentimental tunes and words,
I cleared my head and swept the view
across the past, with different eyes.

I saw a walking mystery,
not just to folks who knew me well
(that's never true, I'm fairly sure
of anyone by anyone) ,
but more especially to me.

So many things I thought were real
were more mirage than certainty,
and so I had to travel back,
to take another look around
that shifting geography of mine;

which led me to this fluxing spot,
this therapeutic vantage point,
which might itself conceal much more
than all it deigns to demonstrate,
beyond my blindness, and the pride

I'd duelled with almost all my days;
and questions that need answering
if understanding's not a vice,
and meaning has a role to play
in this 'poking at things with sticks'

interrogation of the past,
in search of atonement at best,
or form of words I can live with,
for sacred things we violate.
I fled to every battle once:

ambition led, I led the charge,
and proved the wholly worthless case
that I was only who I was;
too driven to be really free.
In courage and in truth I matched

the expectations of the time,
and, maybe his, I'd like to think,
but just how much of that was mine?
The choices that we're moved to make,
have roots too deep and wide to claim,

exclusively for what we are,
more than a superficial role.
A creature partly acting out
the consequential actions of
a thousand generations of,

free will that's anything but free.
And yet each choice is ours alone,
in that vague instant when we leave
our temporary stain upon
the traces that are all but gone.

And now there's no-one left to blame
- if any kind of blame is fair?
He's gone beneath the sod and myth,
and looking better by the day,
as I fall ever deeper down,

into this fraught unravelling.
This mess of criss-crossed chaos where
the only life that's truly real,
now seems to matter least of all.
But anyway, somewhere too far

down one too many dead end streets,
I found my feet and turned to chase,
the falling leaves I didn't rate,
the ghostly shapes I once outran;
to resurrect the evergreens,

forget-me-nots and secret notes,
I'd struggled vainly to cremate;
as revelation seemed to loom.
That shadow of the cliff still falls
across McTaggart's steadfast rock,

and Razor Bills in flight still skim
the ribboned surface of the tide.
And It's no effortless affair.
There's desperation in the air,
at least until they pass us by,

and in the beating wings that strain,
an era echoes strangely on:
a symphony of symmetry
imagined by a youthful me,
a moonlit flight o'er paradise

- a fantasy of breaking through -
the lonely haunting melody
of far off Castle Kennedy,
where cackling geese in ragged lines
sweep in, and come cascading down

upon the cool and moonlit waves
that lap against those winding ways,
the honeysuckle lanes of Inch.
It's not by chance I'm there again.
For every choice I ever made,

soon led me back down that same road,
towards the many things that sprung
from our short sheltering between
the railway line and song of lochs,
to Maggie Gibson's missing gate,

where we would meet beneath the light,
to lagan from abandoned dreams,
betrayal of a blood sealed bond,
some promises I should have kept,
and love, the most betrayed of all,

and all at once the crashing of
tin cans behind a limousine;
to grains of sand through helpless hands;
and worst of all - for quite a while -
the headline news of her regret.

For that place was, I can't deny,
the troubling flames that youth ignites,
a gathering of lovely ghosts,
an Armageddon, and a place
of sanctuary for souls that crave

the clumsy dance of memory -
like all those winter nights with you,
the leaves that left the trees unbid
and all their promise for decay,
that chain of moments passing through,

and marking out the ways we passed
so gently from each others' arms,
into the arms that hold us now.
But time, it ripples on of course,
and all the calm that came at last,

came much too late to steer me from
temptations coming from within:
that rock beneath the ravens nest,
that wall of water waiting still,
beneath those wary midnight wings;

that sinless savage splendour which
still calls me back there, now and then,
to test those reckless odds again -
a lust for judgement maybe, or,
some personal imperative

that steers us to the harvest sown,
so recklessly, so guiltlessly,
along the fragile way we've shaped
along the way that shapes in turn.
And shaped, and shaping, I moved on,

attrition building, running down,
'til, in the end, it came to pass:
platoons of memories marched through
those worn out pointless palisades,
to leave me tattered for a while,

then almost free, it seemed, at last,
amongst the crumbling windswept wastes
of castles built on shifting sands
That kind of desolation scares,
or maybe not when blithely scanned

with hindsight from a cooler height.
But though I'm safely distant now,
from all that turmoil and regret,
I've no contempt for sentiments
that soared with tenderness, or burned

with grief and passion unassuaged.
The wild and ragged bush of youth
is brief and glorious and fraught
and often blinded by itself,
until fell time obliges us

to turn and look at all it was,
with all the honesty we can:
not through the rosy tinted glass
we gazed upon the future with.
Regrets are guaranteed it seems;

redemption's not so easy though;
nor any kind of certainty
that clarity is what it is,
or wisdom's years have more to say
than kindness is the finest thing,

and next to that, well, maybe love.
A vivid rainbow arcs above
an afternoon of rain and shine;
there's plans afoot to build a bridge,
just half a mile or so from here,

across the cold, uncaring Clyde,
where ferry boats have plied their trade
since humankind first learned to dream.

2007 (revised Dec 2018)