Gordon R Menzies

I follow the pale, silken river
of your outstretched leg
from the river mouth, where
your painted toes glittered
...

I've given up poetry

no more pulled faces, long
as autumn grey shadows,
...

Silver leaves beneath the water
lay layered and unmoving
as though painted on the stream bed
discarded love letters, inkless
...

These last leaves between us, Mother
falling from our old family tree
your last few clinging in your winter
mine, yet coloured in my autumn days
...

when she wears the long blue shirt
she is a lost ocean I wish to name
hypnotic fabric wave over wave
white buttons mother-of-pearl
...

Nestled there beneath her heart
listening to the waves crashing
with futility upon the curve
of her ribs, the sturdy piles
...

I have bared myself
a black wind blows
the night snow falls
falling flakes touch
...

We've lost the accommodating grin
Of a summer morning, the soft, derisive jeers
For we Anglers, our flies and our waders
With shoes wet with the morning dew
...

The rain falls so heavily
around my green canoe
we are slowly swimming
through sudden grey veil
...

In its hollow handle
Robertson and Philips
still rattle and battle
with every determined
...

An old broken tree in a corner field
forgotten, far too difficult to plow
leans pensive on a split cedar fence
reaching one splintered arm over a
...

Behind the rusted chain linked fence
guarding the treasures of the town yard,
pre-cast concrete pipe and tubing
waiting to be buried beneath our feet,
...

In the sage days of fleet July kindnesses, the
free people gather in their small ragged tribes
in the borderlands beyond street and sidewalk
amid the unshorn green of an opaline riverbank
...

She ensures her cover is always new
glossy, eye catching and ever changing
flashy title rewritten in gold or silver script
entirely new genres on occasion
...

She found them cast off in a meadow, each
a black stretch of shadow left in the brome
knelt and considered their long narrow length
pulled them on slowly, unthinking, like silk
...

A Swainson hawk sits on a weathered post
where no border was ever meant to be,
peppered brown, fused to the wood of it,
with ragged remnant of a ground squirrel
...

Sometimes I find my Self wandering
unexpectedly wandering in your dreams
we are holding hands there, running
running to things, running from things
...

Robins hunt among the mossy tombs
and I am hunting with them
they, for red worms wriggling
me, for poetry among the stones
...

The evening wind brings nothing
across the lake tonight, it rocks
the sleepy fishes in their dreams
passes through the three cairns
...

Laika, my little love, the Barker
plucked from the frozen streets
of an ambitious Moscow
by the hairless apes who dream
...