Question your teaspoons

if you find yourself

taking the side road                                        

up the stony track

you will surely lose yourself

among leafy secrecies

wandering thin brick paths

where you’re sure

to meet yourself

coming back

stepping on stones

out to the small isles

floating upon the little ponds                         

where the little sailboats

once tacked their hanky-

sails about

wish, Hölderlin's Isle, photograph Alistair Peebles, 2010

where the pines’

freshly swept needles

pattern an arc                                             

where the last shaft

of sun falls through

camouflage leafage

where the gnomon

divides the hour

fathering shadow

where time's vertical

is drawn toward

an autumnal thought

Hugh MacDiarmid wryly refers to Stonypath as being down ‘the side road to Dunsyre’ in an interview; the

pine needles around ‘wood-wind song’ were swept into neat circles around the trunks.

The first photograph is by Alistair Peebles, 2010; the poem reads, 'the beginning / and end / is water', and is hanging beside the source at Stonypath.

These poems were first published in Question Your Teaspoons (Calderwood Press).