5 Halloween poems

All Souls’ over, the roast seeds eaten, I set on a backporch post our sculpted pumpkin under the weather, warm still for November. Night and day it gapes in at us through the kitchen window, going soft in the head. Sleepwalker-slow, a black rash of ants harrows this hollow globe, munching the pale peach flesh, sucking its seasoned last juices dry. In a week, when the ants and humming flies are done, only a hard remorseless light drills and tenants it through and through. Within, it turns mould-black in patches, stays days like this while the weather takes it in its shifty arms: wide eye-spaces shine, the disapproving mouth holds firm. Another week, a sad leap forward: sunk to one side so an eye-socket’s almost blocked, it becomes a monster of its former self. Human, it would have rotted beyond unhappiness and horror to some unspeakable subject state—its nose no more than a vertical hole, the thin bridge of amber between nose and mouth in ruins. The other socket opens wider than ever: disbelief. It’s all downhill from here: knuckles of sun, peremptory steady fingers of frost, strain all day and night— cracking the rind, kneading the knotted fibres free. The crown, with its top-knot mockery of stalk, caves in; the skull buckles; the whole sad head drips tallowy tears: the end is in sight. In a day or two it topples on itself like ruined thatch, pus-white drool spidering from the corner of the mouth, worming its way down the body-post. All dignity to the winds, it bows its bogeyman face of dread to the inevitable. And now, November almost out, it is in the bright unseasonable sunshine a simmer of pulp, a slow bake, amber shell speckled chalk-grey with lichen. Light strikes and strikes its burst surfaces: it sags, stays at the end of its brief tether—a helmet of dark circles, death caul. Here is the last umbilical gasp, everybody’s nightmare parent, the pitiless system rubbing our noses in it. But pity poor lantern-head with his lights out, glob by greasy glob going back where he came from: as each seed-shaped drop falls free, it catches and clutches for one split second the light. When the pumpkin lapses to our common ground at last—where a swaddle of snow will fold it in no time from sight—I try to take in the empty space it’s left on top of the wooden post: it is that empty space.

The ghost is a torn sheet, the skeleton’s suit came from a rack in a store the witch is flameproof, but who knows what dark streets they have taken here? Brother Death, here is a candy bar. For the lady wearing the hat from Salem: gum. And a penny for each eye, Lost Soul. They fade away with their heavy sacks. Thanks! I yell just in time. Thanks for another year!

(The Celtic Halloween) In the season leaves should love, since it gives them leave to move through the wind, towards the ground they were watching while they hung, legend says there is a seam stitching darkness like a name. Now when dying grasses veil earth from the sky in one last pale wave, as autumn dies to bring winter back, and then the spring, we who die ourselves can peel back another kind of veil that hangs among us like thick smoke. Tonight at last I feel it shake. I feel the nights stretching away thousands long behind the days till they reach the darkness where all of me is ancestor. I move my hand and feel a touch move with me, and when I brush my own mind across another, I am with my mother's mother. Sure as footsteps in my waiting self, I find her, and she brings arms that carry answers for me, intimate, a waiting bounty. "Carry me." She leaves this trail through a shudder of the veil, and leaves, like amber where she stays, a gift for her perpetual gaze.

Tonight I light the candles of my eyes in the lee And swing down this branch full of red leaves. Yellow moon, skull and spine of the hare, Arrow me to town on the neck of the air. I hear the undertaker make love in the heather; The candy maker, poor fellow, is under the weather. Skunk, moose, raccoon, they go to the doors in threes With a torch in their hands or pleas: "O, please . . ." Baruch Spinoza and the butcher are drunk: One is the tail and one is the trunk Of a beast who dances in circles for beer And doesn't think twice to learn how to steer. Our clock is blind, our clock is dumb. Its hands are broken, its fingers numb. No time for the martyr of our fair town Who wasn't a witch because she could drown. Now the dogs of the cemetery are starting to bark At the vision of her, bobbing up through the dark. When she opens her mouth to gasp for air, A moth flies out and lands in her hair. The apples are thumping, winter is coming. The lips of the pumpkin soon will be humming. By the caw of the crow on the first of the year, Something will die, something appear.

Be perfect, make it otherwise. Yesterday is torn in shreds. Lightning’s thousand sulfur eyes Rip apart the breathing beds. Hear bones crack and pulverize. Doom creeps in on rubber treads. Countless overwrought housewives, Minds unraveling like threads, Try lipstick shades to tranquilize Fears of age and general dreads. Sit tight, be perfect, swat the spies, Don’t take faucets for fountainheads. Drink tasty antidotes. Otherwise You and the werewolf: newlyweds.