Winter Trails

Haunted House

To entertain a dreary day away
while troops of trees hold up hard hands
out there,  taken prisoners of winter,
thorns berry-bloody in their own barbed wire,
I, a prisoner of this haunted house
held in part  by the inclement weather
and by studious tasks laid upon me,
note sometimes when I've turned the heating off
I hear the whirring of the boiler plain
go down, to find it switched back on again.
Sometimes when I'm writing in the kitchen -
those bumps above. There. By the sound of it,
on the landing at the top of the stairs.
What creaks and taps and steps and clicks at night;
and as for a plucking of guitar strings
where they lie on the top bunk of the room
which was also Catherine's study, well,
yes, now I leave that light on all night long.
Catherine once felt a soft hand brush her hair
and someone tugged her apron by the sink.
Only two days ago my daughter saw
a grey shape entering the living room
from the hall door and vanish into air.
To cap it I might tell of the deep night
nearly a year ago, when Catherine's kids
and mine all in the house, the two girls
in that same end bedroom both woken by
a bright light through the door crack spilling in
and a bulged child-sized silhouette standing
for more than a minute, though I doubt it
was more than a boy outside the door, asleep,
and his shadow cast across the bookcase.
The girls wouldn't have that. Surprising
they didn't appear terrified, nor I
to be here, yet "Let's respect my guitar,"
I tell the invisible lingerers,
"I am 'The Other'. You now just  goose-bumps."