Winterfylleth

Before adopting the Latin name October, the Anglo-Saxons called this time Winterfylleth, which literally means 'winter full moon' and marks the exact lunar cycle when they believed winter began.

Winterfylleth

She sits on the porch of a house that wasn’t here yesterday
watching the fog roll off the black rooflines.

Here she is a grid of asphalt and damp soil
where the streetlamps flicker awake at four in the afternoon
and the air tastes of iron and bruised apples.

Walk down her avenue of wet, horse chestnuts
your boots sink into layers of rotting gold,
the sound of  soft hush, hush against the concrete curb.

In the distance the brakes of the last bus hiss against the dark
stopping for no one, releasing the smell of exhaust and lost summers
straight into the back of your throat.

Winterfylleth does not speak,
but you hear her everywhere

in the frantic scratching of dry oak leaves against the window glass,
in the sudden, sharp whistle of wind through the chains of empty swings,
in the heavy silence of the cul-de-sac
with the single, unblinking candle in the pane.

(Do not knock on that door. The stairs lead nowhere.)

She opens a gate of rusted wire and twilight.

A trail cuts past the suburban park,
narrow and dark,
a path that was only an overgrown thicket in September.

She steps aside to let you pass,
her fingers trailing the first frost across your sleeve.

Enter the woods.
The cold is waiting.