Skeleton Fingers

Summer foliage makes soft shadow-dances
on the wall all night, like the figures
your father taught you: duck, alligator, butterfly. Winter
shows the skeleton fingers inside the green glove.

Last night on my street
trees thrashed naked under the lights:
arboreal ecdysiasts shining wet against darkness
accompanied by rain drumming
louder than thunder. In my sleep they marched and menaced,
gaunt shadows sliding over parked cars, distant sounds

of glass smashing. They heaved pavement, choked drains,
lifted grates from storm sewers, scooped out clots of half-rotted leaves
and scattered them on sidewalks in vegetal calligraphy
I could not read. They dragged down power lines, crushed houses
and the sleepers in them.

They turned to me no features of gnarled bark,
nothing so friendly as a jack o’lantern skull. They wore storm
like wings of darkness. They had no faces, but plucked at me
with twiggy hands, bony fingers

and inhuman, wooden curiosity.

Available! High-Voltage Lines, Knocking from Inside