Your House
I pass your old house sometimes, in the car,
or walking with friends, and I sneak a glance
at the front door where we stood some nights,
or up at the middle window. The light
bounces from the pane, strikes a deeper flame,
fades, and stars crash, heavy with memory,
and that gorgeous wound is open again.
And sometimes it seems there was nothing else,
except “what should have been”, but for folly
and the currents that focussed my blindness.
But not often. The tides of life flow on.
I know where we stand, and why we’re there.
It’s the truth of a crowded youth, where,
clarity never showed, never played a part
and where, for all the sins of history,
love alone might never have been enough.
The sharp roughcast has been painted over.
The old fence has been replaced and the doors
and windows too. All that lingers there still
is a story that hasn’t been told, and,
it’s not the fear of forgetting now
that sometimes imprisons an aging mind.
It’s the hints of heaven, the reminders
of the heights that promise reaches,
of the heights we’re prone to fall from.
Up the street, past the light at Maggie’s gate -
where we often would meet just after eight -
I wander again round that endless bend
of that village on the brink of the world,
mind bridging the years as you hover -
as memory tells it now of that first walk -
on a dark winter’s night in sixty seven:
speed talking, speed floating through the old quarter.
Did I confuse latin and french you asked?
Someone passed us then, barely visible,
opposite McGhee's garage, and was gone,
And you and I, engrossed, walked on and on...
Our old school looms like a primitive force
bustling with kids with the same kind of dreams.
I walk through another age, a stranger
looking over valleys of flowing change,
devoid of signs of us. I superimpose
an older world beyond the rusting gates
and see a satchel on your shoulder,
mischief run wild on your smiling face,
and for a lost moment get the urge
to raise a trembling hand and wave fondly,
[...] Read more
poem by Jim Hogg
Added by Poetry Lover
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