White China Plates I

    1
    The moon hummed like a refrigerator,
    light thru shadows
    - the solitude of dusk closing in;
    black scars visible across
    the moon's face shaped like
    mountainous hands, all
    silent, the occasional leaf rustling.

    2
    My fork at plate's edge listening,
    listening to the haunting one eye
    on the staircase wall white
    as the numb light outside palest night.
    Caught off-guard, the musty settee
    and armchair acting as hallucinogen
    to the nostril, the calendar of events
    playing ghostly tag with sheer curtains
    hovering, shroud-like, on the family Bible
    big and brown as the Lord's foot stool.

    3
    The unravelling tale slowly much as
    thick yarn with a kitten
    batting it, one event at a time
    in sepulchre movement down a
    linoleum floor. Two twins burning,
    fever scalded in frigid water only
    shock setting in, dying to join
    the black creek water from which
    her unwilling buckets borrowed
    this liquid crucifixion and bitter vinegar.

    4
    Or the drive-house door, silent in precision,
    unseen hands before marauding
    hoofs in unison dark from windows' edge
    to better hear little poke of
    sleigh bells or harness rattling grim
    with a sick man's cough.

    5
    This admission of spectral animals
    somehow more unsettling than
    the young woman next combing her
    hair at the foot of the bed scaring
    the daylights out of me picturing
    the whereabouts of stockinged feet,
    these tricksters from another world;
    drum and kettle corps gypsy fife
    with harbinger doom to rasp of
    falling broom -
    old and yellow silky straw witch's hair -
    and a cat dark
    as the Devil's very bread.