Your House Poem by jim hogg

I

I pass your old house sometimes, in the car,
or walking with friends, and sneak a quick glance
at the door where we stood in each other's arms,
or up at the window you'd open at night,
and masses of images circle and tempt.

II

The roughcast 's been painted over since then.
The windows and doors have all been replaced.
And though it's all changed, your front garden fence
still tempts just as much; to look for your eyes
through cool starlit nights, when we were fifteen,
when all that echoed were your voice and mine.

III

What if it all was ordained after all
and all that broke down was fated to fail?
Were slants of starlight the shaping force
that scribbled the future into our eyes?
What kind of answer would satisfy now
when both of us know this life takes its course
from millions of unpredictable things?
Our choices are hardly choices at all
under duress from the moments that chase
all of the moments just waiting to be.
We spill our emotions into the mix
and destiny seems to lack all control;
clarity somehow gets all its lines wrong.
I can't blame the stars that sent so much thrill
as you and I circled our little world
on far distant nights when we were still kids,
when promise shone brightly in your blue blue eyes;

IV

And so, some years on, I stood in your house,
then sat in the room where you used to sit,
and the house was you, and the air was you
and I was the two of us, sitting alone,
breathing in all of my well earned deserts;
careening though time to your father's voice:
a whispering chair beside the hall door.
He was gone too, nearly ten years before.
And all that I said then, all that I thought
was haunted all night by echoes of you.

IV

But back on the Crescent, there's old Maggie's gate -
where some winter nights we'd meet after eight
to wander again round that half-moon bend
that bordered the brink of the passing world,
and conjures up thoughts of our very first walk
on a dark winter's night in late sixty six:
through the old quarter, and through the new scheme.
You asked if I mixed up latin and french
as someone we almost certainly knew,
passed like a ghost by McGhee's and was gone
as you and I kept walking on...

V

I stop once again, beside Milligan's house,
and stare at the woodland that hides so much:
the road that's lost now but wasn't lost then
the swing tree where our initials were carved
the single track railway that brought us the world
through billows of steam when trains still stopped here,
and find myself carried all the way back
into the leaving of all that I'd known.
The wind through those trees kept calling me 'home',
marking with sadness our time and our place.
And now, from wherever, I still clearly see
them bending before a surging southerly,
and hear its lonely sighs through the leaves:
a whispering song that reminds me to call
a number I don't know how to forget.

VI

On the table at home lies a photograph
with both you and I from so long ago
when time was only a meaningless word;
the future was only an endless sky.
Above me the birds are all flying south
and raindrops trace crazy paths down the panes,
to a song you mentioned in seventy three
whose lyrics I didn't have time for then.
But here at last, they've cut me off at the pass -
the patient soldiers of love and regret -
I look and I listen too many times
to compensate now for not listening when
I should have heard what your heart clearly said,
long before limousines, long before lace;
though fate rolled the dice one more luckless time
and steered us both to the same busy lounge,
just before you were to give up your name.
We taunted each other with yearning eyes
but kept our distance and honoured the course
our lives seemed determined to drive us along
from some kind of choices, some kind of truth.
And so you became nirvana, no less,
leaving me blinded, as much by the past
as I once used to be by the future.

VII

Some yards further round, past the Modrates and Reids,
our old school looms like a primitive force,
bustling with kids with the same kind of dreams.
I walk through their modern age like a fetch
confounded by scenery of fast flowing change,
and nowhere the slightest traces of us.
I superimpose a much older world
beyond the locked gates, where both of us played,
and see a satchel over your shoulder,
mischief run wild on your sweet smiling face,
and for a lost moment I get the urge
to lift up a trembling hand in the hope
I'll see you wave back, from there or elsewhere,
with no commitment or small talk required.
A wave across any distance would do.
But distance like that's not a physical thing
There is no substance that could ever bridge
the lives that we've led, the things that we've done
except for those many moments we shared.

VIII

My best guess would be that it all began
across the old ping pong table at school,
Yon delicate ball would fade to a blur,
and speed back and forth beneath our locked eyes,
minute by minute, both blind to the world,
that one day would see our game to its close.

2007