Under a milky moon

What story haunts you?

what shadow lies
shifting and slipping,
upon your glebe,
a repressed possession
pervasive and dank
harrowing this glade
with its primal dread
under a graven night?

what canard vexes
your tender tract,
corroding and staining,
preying the peace,
spinning its oily tendrils
from rafter to rail,
a cruel confidence
under a creeping dark?

what story haunts you?
its fictions pestering 
your unguarded plots,
nettling vulnerable
fields, its harmless
haystacks shapeshift
in the gloom 
shuffling, rustling
under a milky moon?

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Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

—Edgar Allan Poe

Poem 15 of 31 in the series “The Liminal Season.”

Two friends suggested the word “haunted” for this prompt, oddly with also the word “haystack.” I love this time of year because, for me, it feels like there’s always a sense of terrific, melancholic wonder — the thinning of the veil that invites dreadful experiences into our darker hours.

Thanks to my brother John and to my writer friend Shirley for the prompt.