Terminus Poem by jim hogg

I walk the dog, the dog walks me
within this finely jazzed up fog
I faded out of gradually
in to some kind of calling from
the crumbling edge of everything

wild apples in old unwalked woods
the wheel that used to mill the grain
the flooding tide in shapely bays
or something on the bridge that links
the many shifting things we missed

between the brinks and sheltered lanes
the hints unseen within the dream
a telling smile, a broken fence
the merest touch, a certain stance
a moment's thrill, some thirst unquenched

or urge to crash the dusty past
or fabricate the perfect hat
to catch and sail the ardent winds
that squall across the oceans of
a vast expanding consciousness

that's waited fourteen billion years
to dream this thing we seem to be
this tyranny of quark and mesh
this battering by egg and urge
of all these figments we've become

vain fetches of our inner gods
all hollowed, numbed, yet not quite dead
in rooms and corridors devoid
of hearts that skipped so out of time
but, now and then, the homely smell

of burning branches on the wind
that blows from careless yesterdays
and fills my head and certain glens
I said 'I love you', fervently
in this bed here just hours ago

while you were in a longish coat
and we were in each others' arms
in some strange clearing far from here
in woodland thick with yearning years
a weaving binding us at last

within so many conjured things
and wanting spun from traces blown
through forty seven summers flown
to burn or not to burn, I asked
and crave the ashes that we are

oh what a thing it is to love

(fragment from A Dream Reflects)