High Country Haunting

Spirits stalk me in my sleep

with count-down timings

and pillowed double meanings

They haunt me down the hallways

and wait up the stairways.

They follow me from swamps

to mountaintops.

Entities slither through aspen trees

keeping watchful eyes.

They comb through cypress moss…

like caterpillars dropping on my head,

like black widow spiders

crawling through the ash

of my childhood playhouse.

And I am barefoot.

The woman on the wall begins to bleed

all the colors from the canvas,

the one my mother painted,

the one with the pensive eyes.

She’s crying again–

red tears that keep the

meningitis away.

The spirits tap upon my window

so frosted from the blizzard,

breath too cold to fog it up.

They’re calling me home,

back to a broader meadow

past the live oak branch

down the way

from the green deer stand,

rubber boots through

the wet, marshy grassland.

And gaze upon

ancient volcanic pinnacles

too high to safely summit

alone.