She roams wild night
in watercolors painted
with the brush of autumn’s chill.
He doesn’t know her name…
Where she lives…Or if she is even real.
She is a ghost beyond his curtains
that makes him blush like
a fourteen-year-old boy.
He’s not sure why he chose to buy
a house with land the size of a church
parking lot, but if hell has a Bible,
it hoodwinked him into weakness.
Everything around him had been abandoned,
turned to rust and rot, and broken windows
that winked every time he traveled past them
to reach his driveway haunted with silhouettes
of tree limbs pasted on the pavement by the moon.
It was early October when he first saw
the ethereal beauty walking among the
frost bitten roses of his garden.
She appeared to be talking to an owl
who sat immobile on a fence post
so enraptured it didn’t budge when
he opened the back door.
Startled like a skittish kitten, she
escaped into the shadows, and no
wooing of his voice could lure
her from her seclusion.
He stood at his window for weeks
waiting for night to drink the last
wine of sunset, hoping, praying as
if he were a newborn convert climbing
out of baptismal water, she’d return.
Then on the last night before winter
would break morning’s horizon she
walked out of the ebony to stand
beneath a lantern he’d placed
on a post as if it were a lighthouse
to bring a ship safely to the shore.
He watched her standing, staring
back at him wearing a dress
so sheer he could see the pink of
her flesh flirting from beneath it.
He tried to hold the stare, not blink,
but he couldn’t stop his eyes from closing.
In that tiniest eyelash of time, she disappeared.
A hundred questions wrestled with his sanity.
She’s real...She’s not real…She’s real…
He concluded it didn’t matter. After all
love was insanity, a risking of a heart not
knowing if it can remain whole.
He wasn’t sure if tomorrow winter
would steal her from him or she
was a waif of Autumn who would
return when the oak dipped leaves in orange.
What he knew, if she was real, he wouldn’t
want to tame her. She had awakened the wild,
the fragile, the bold in him. Love had brought freedom.
©Susie Clevenger 2025
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