Here’s a poem for the day from my book The Man in Green, published back in 1996 by Lee Chapman’s First Intensity Press.

The Pumpkins at Panther Lake

Another ambivalent landscape, October
a boy hangs a dummy
from a flagpole into dark late morning
of interior embered still
with years into the earliness, the myth residing
at a barned-in shore, a
ghost-burnt afternoon gone north
for pumpkins on the swell of
all the riches of the childish and innocent
grotesque, affirmed in what the great
pillaring oaks by the lake suggested; scarecrow-witches
of delight come longing
in anniversary—that
precise magic—mist-scent
tight in the mask’s mold
through eye-holes into the image-lode’s
permission, about to return
to memory the inside