November Harvest
--Anita Endrezze 

Barns huddle over the horns
of cattle, whose dreams
are four-chambered,
the white hearts of winter. 

In the shadows of thorns,
the farmers are without
substance.
Under the roots,
the warm slow sleepers
are not dreaming of us.
Their breaths pass into
the myths of animals. 

All November fields are dark
passages into the earth.
What the owl flies into
we call night.
The moon is a windfall, a pear
weathering to the core.
The scarecrow is quiet;
a small wind lifts
his eyeless sack of a head. 

When the Harvest God comes,
he wears a suit black
as parson's cloth.
His tongue is a brown leaf,
his sermon a mouthful of wheat.
What we leave in the fields
is his: misshapen pumpkins,
spotted apples, rotted beans.
Where the soft  decay touches
the soil, mouths form,
then heads thick as clay,
bodies like corn shocks,
hands, fingers, legs, toes
like odd-sized gourds. 

In the furrows of our beds,
we hear their clumping walk
and dream of weak breaths,
lungful of seeds.
They circle our houses,
tapping the windows,
their pale tongues
sprouting out to us
in our mutual darkness.