The Poetry Corner

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.