Here's a first cut at another Halloween poem. I reserve the right to revise it.

Their Woods

There in the dark
Everything seemed older than me
My uncle, my cousins, the woods
But especially the woods

After a day of fishing at the creek
We gathered on the road to the barn
At the place by the henhouse
Where it forked and went down
To the pond in the woods

A small expedition
Launched at night
To carry the bait trap
Down to the pond
Where the crawdads
Would keep fresh

I didn’t want them to go without me
I was worried they might come back changed
Bonded in some way I could not know
Or caught and replaced by monsters
And I would never know

But I was scared
And the white circle of light
From the hissing gas lantern
Seemed too small and fragile
To keep back the woods and the dark

Or perhaps I was afraid
That they might change
Down there in the woods
And I would not

So I stayed behind
And I’ll never know
What the pond was like
In the woods that night
And whether they changed

For a Departed Swimming Pool

The man we hired to fill the old pool
Got the backhoe through the fence, but
To get his dump truck into the yard
Had to uproot a burning bush
Which proved to have a nest of bumble bees
In its roots

And now they swarm there
Awaiting Diaspora from the from the only home
They’ve ever known
A world of shade and green
Become a wasteland of mud and straw

Milling about not enraged but hapless
Longing for the promised land
Waiting for their Moses
To lead them across the dirt filled pool
Away from pharaoh and his backhoe

But until they depart
We must go quietly
And put on our shoes
As though crossing holy ground

Here's a Halloween poem, a bit early.

The Dark Orchard

I used to live in a old house
Perhaps sixty or seventy years old
From the 1910’s or 1920’s
And it had an orchard

Almost as old and gone to seed
Almost as long
Grown up with low limbs
And brush, and small trees
The ground was spongy with
Rotting apples
Smelling of
Rotting Cider
Full of the sound of
Wasps

There was a hostility about the place
As though, having been abandoned by Man
Man was no longer welcome

And the trees seemed to watch
And to whisper among themselves
As though waiting
For some Man to go there alone
In the dark
Or in a storm

To the point where
I worried for the deer
That browsed there at night
That the trees might sense them
And decide to get in
A bit of practice

I've been studying to have my poetic license renewed, so I will post a series of poems. The first has two versions, because I can't decide which I like the best. The first version has a quality like transliterated haiku, which I like, but the second version flows better:

Embrace

I saw a glove
Stomped into the parking lot
Of an old warehouse

The fingers spread like wings
At first I thought
It was a bird

It grasped the asphalt
To its palm
The way a dead bird
Clutches the earth
To its breast


(Alternate Version)

I saw a glove
Stomped into the parking lot
Of an old warehouse

At first I thought
It was a bird

The fingers spread like wings
And grasped the asphalt
To its palm

The way a dead bird
Clutches the earth
To its breast