Michael Hogan
Parallel Lives
I’ve forgotten much of what I used to remember:
the cause of the Seven Years War, the value of Pi to six digits,
the capital of Bolivia,
baggage I thought was important.
Things I carried inside my head like pebbles,
others like boulders:
fear of flying, fear of dying
sudden unexplained panics, fear of what was out there in the dark
all submerged now in the business of living.
But in quiet moments (Oh…La Paz, by the way)
they emerge real as they’ve ever been.
None of the ancient cypress trees which sentinel our neighborhood
can blind me to the setting suns of parallel lives I´ve escaped:
loss of limb in a futile war, death at an early age,
vast darkness of dementia choking the brain with inky tentacles
as time runs out like the air of a diver who has lingered too long.
It would be foolish not to be grateful
for these quickening years, this free fall
caught briefly in the chute of time.
Michael Hogan is the author In the Time of the Jacarandas (Egret Books, 2015) and 23 other books. His work has appeared in the Paris Review, the Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, New Letters, and others. His work is included in Perrine’s Sound and Sense and the Pushcart Prize Book of Poetry. Hogan lives in Guadalajara Mexico with the fabric artist Lucinda Mayo and their Dutch Shepard Molly Malone.
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