Constant Companion

by Bruce McRae

Ondrej Supitar

What follows me has a number of eyes and a good many feet and fingers. Its mouth is filled with all those little black words. It’s traveling in circles, a void beckoning.

What follows me is the wind aching in the branches. Like the moon on brass wheels or crusaders in search of their lost philosopher-king. Like a carpenter’s dusty-footed disciples.

I can hear footsteps inside of other footsteps, beating a path under the bracken, tamping down a road made of willows and sighs; that which is following me also being followed.

As if for a last breath, I reach far back and touch its imperious hair-do.

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Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician currently residing on Salt Spring Island, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with well over a thousand poems published internationally in magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His books are The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press), AnUnbecoming Fit Of Frenzy (Cawing Crow Press), Like As If (Pskis Porch), and Hearsay (The Poet’s Haven).