9.3.13

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).



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