Witches worry us.
The conversation
goes on inside, core,
fruit inside the rind.
Peeled away, the word
comes out, orange
in autumn sunlight, yes.
But we worry.
And why not? The juice
of what we fear
is somehow sweet: ask
any child if they’d rather
meet a wizard or a priest.
Somehow all our many lives
harvest is the time of fruit and hear.

2.
Rheostat, regulate
the flow. I slept
too soundly
to have anything to say.

3.
But dreamt about faux-amis,
words that mean something
other than what we mean
when we pronounce them,
write them down, whisper
them to someone else. False
friends, it means, and maybe
the dream meant them too
but made me think it
was all about grammar
not about grief.

4.
The pallor of things known
compared to the somber
colors of the guessed-at—
children love that, dressing
up means lots of color,
even that blaring white
more shocking than scarlet.
Color what you know
with what you don’t!
Saturate the senses
with loud maybes,
call it dressing up for Halloween.

5.
Sun on Rainday
uh-oh.
Have I betrayed
the calendar again.
Or is it waiting,
my big glass of water,
out and up
beyond the conscious trees?

6.
We can find fear
in the meagerest evidence,
shadow of the witch’s hat
falls across what we are reading,
her cat rubs by our ankles,
her warlock husband growls
from every passing car.
                                                 She herself
is hidden, though, so deep
inside us we will never see.

19 October 2020