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White China Plates I
By Paul Cameron Brown
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.
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