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
...

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

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
...

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
...

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
...

In the crowded marketplace you singled me out,
somehow saw the loneliness beneath the dust of my travel.
you, a black-haired Inca girl in a dirty dress,
skin brown as the clay roofs of Cuzco,
...

She thought I brought her flowers every day
water'd them with happy tears when she'd awake
yet in truth, it did not happen in this way
for only once to her, these flowers did I take
...

In the bay of sleeping muskies
Where the grey goose dreams
and the mist upon the water
leaves nothing as it seems
...

you were a little boy, the night
we slept in my uncles barn while
the ratty farm cats crept about us
jumping with fleas and hungry
...

I write the finest lines between
your pale legs splayed, these
pages where the ink will not dry
in the shadow of mountains
...

I wander by riverside grass
learning the names of trees,
watched by curious magpies
who know, I think, as I do
...

The crumbling ridge falls bare in the April sun
where the snow, in surrender, runs to the river
and red-bellied robins spring from the juniper
flashes of flame in the dappled morning light
...

the green water of the lake of little fishes
stroked the sand with verdant hands, where
grasshoppers lingered on the warm pebbles
and black-headed terns had come to fly
...