Novemberling

In honor of Halloween,and all things that go bump in the night, a poem.

  And check out the lovely work at http://www.goblinfruit.net/ It’s a feast for the eyes and imagination.

Novemberling

When skeletal leaves chatter on the walks

and cattails along the river droop,

            I’ve seen them clinging to the riverbank,

moss green fingers knobby as willow wood

digging into damp. Imagined the spindly arm behind,

cold and sinewy, trying to hoist the shriveled body to shore.

Among November’s browns and grays,

it’s one more perishing mound along the walk,

and it will be looking for a hiding place,

a holing-up-in, waiting place,

dry and warm, the hollows of trees

feathered with leaves or better yet,

the attic eaves, if it can slide in through the vents,

the bedroom floor where dust bunnies burrow,

beneath the bed where no one looks,

behind the basement stairs.

Before the freeze, before the white hair of frost

rises in alarm, across our lawns, its wide-webbed feet

must find their way. What birth is this,

what stars, what night, that calls them

from the mired shores to the crevices of light?