Three Poems by J.B. Hogan

 

“Falling, Drifting” 

 

On a gentle day with light breeze,

yellow Aspen leaves falling, drifting,

from full-faded, forgotten pages,

free of all half-truths in endgame

afterlife, the alien weight, the

plague, the black death signalling,

nothing up ahead, save blue haze

at signpost 279 obscuring her dewy throne

while moving through the pass into a

dry country only to find and feel the

weight of being in her presence, even if

she was not there when you died. 

 

 

“At Heathrow”

 

A random stranger at Heathrow

circling a famous author

like he was a holy leper or the

corridor was the shallow – and not wide –

Rubicon waiting to be crossed or

Cadillac Mountain to be climbed,

all variations on a theme as if

he were poor Dostoevsky at Semenovski Square

heavy Thomas Wolfe seeing James Joyce

the day just half done, feeling like a blood thief,

with time become an arrow and the

baboon cliffs in his mind searched

for a lingua franca, a Hemingway hotel,

Dickens in America, even Faulkner in Paris

to overturn the hourglass, its grains descending

until, like an orphan, all that remains is the

memory of the final, the last contact. 

 

“Memories”

 

Well, we all know by now that

God is a metaphor and that it is

what it is and it’s all captured

in the bleating of a blind kid’s cry and

there’s no ultimate metamorphosis,

no eternal running down Highway 65

looking to see if he, or anyone, is coming –

even from 32,000 feet in an ice storm

over Nairobi when you know full well that

there is not the slightest chance that anyone,

anywhere, will ever even believe you

now and that you can never,

no matter how much you want to,

take back those memories and

make them your own again – never.

J. B. Hogan has published over 280 stories and poems, as well as eleven books, including Bounty Riders, Bar Harbor (short fiction), Time and Time Again, Mexican Skies, Tin Hollow, Living Behind Time, Losing Cotton, The Rubicon, Fallen (short fiction), The Apostate, and Angels in the Ozarks (nonfiction, local professional baseball history). He also was a contributing researcher and writer for The Square Book (local history). He lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.