To entertain a dreary day away
while troops of trees hold up hard hands
out there, taken prisoners of winter,
thorns berry-bloody in their own barbed wire,
I, a prisoner of this haunted house
held in part by the inclement weather
and by studious tasks laid upon me,
note sometimes when I've turned the heating off
I hear the whirring of the boiler plain
go down, to find it switched back on again.
Sometimes when I'm writing in the kitchen -
those bumps above. There. By the sound of it,
on the landing at the top of the stairs.
What creaks and taps and steps and clicks at night;
and as for a plucking of guitar strings
where they lie on the top bunk of the room
which was also Catherine's study, well,
yes, now I leave that light on all night long.
Catherine once felt a soft hand brush her hair
and someone tugged her apron by the sink.
Only two days ago my daughter saw
a grey shape entering the living room
from the hall door and vanish into air.
To cap it I might tell of the deep night
nearly a year ago, when Catherine's kids
and mine all in the house, the two girls
in that same end bedroom both woken by
a bright light through the door crack spilling in
and a bulged child-sized silhouette standing
for more than a minute, though I doubt it
was more than a boy outside the door, asleep,
and his shadow cast across the bookcase.
The girls wouldn't have that. Surprising
they didn't appear terrified, nor I
to be here, yet "Let's respect my guitar,"
I tell the invisible lingerers,
"I am 'The Other'. You now just goose-bumps."
YOU ARE READING
Winter Trails
PoetryWinter Trails is an album of my poems, journeying through late fall when the wire of the trees begins to dominate, till the end of January. After promoting it and it soaring to three quarter million reads, Wattpad unceremoniously dumped it. Here it...