Hallows

I stepped out to look at my laden oak this autumn-blue morning

and was, at once, surprised—just beyond,

buzzards swarmed and swirled in a high funnel, in silence, inevitable.

An end seems suddenly relevant this stalking season.

At the house here, we still receive a dead man’s mail—

Mr. Patton, from whose estate my brother bought the place.

When he moved in, an elderly neighbor came over,

pointed to a spot on the kitchen floor and said,

“That’s where we found him.”

(He didn’t go barefoot in there until he had the kitchen redone.)

This weekend, working in the yard, we found some of Patton’s relics:

a hefty metal box, sunk in the side woods, brimming with rusty water;

in the bushes, two smudged vials,

one labeled “Arthropode / Diplode / Milliped,” which clinked inside when shook,

and a black cat cut-out, flaked with rust, cat’s-eye marbles for its azure eyes.

We pried up the plywood wheelchair ramp, shoddily constructed for Mr. Patton,

now worn and dangerously slick when damp (always).

Underneath, dust dry in debris and twig-bones

we found the crowning plum:

a mummified possum’s head—

(the sinister side) skin stretched as brittle canvas, perforated by snout-whisker stubble,

a shriveled leaf of an ear waiting to fall,

its toothy, eyeless grimace petrified.

I suppose it sought a dry place to expire;

and that’s where we found it.

For Halloween this year, we’ll place all these artifacts in the rusty box,

rig it all up with fishing line,

and bring folks out in the backyard for a scare.

We’ll laugh as the girls scream and recoil,

all thanks to Mr. Patton,

and we’ll return to the house to toast and dance till the knotted calendar yawns to reset.

Then, as I trundle off to bed, always the last awake,

I know I’ll wonder about it all:

where the former owner—and his possum—now resides

(with no forwarding address, we keep his stuff);

if the harvest and its end were good, were appropriate;

whether we were well disguised for the numinous eve;

blearily—did proctor Crane dodge the hurled orange lantern;

could auld Tam in fact reach the keystone o’er Doon;

and if, burrowing in bed, I hadn’t just caught the sound

of the skirl and prance of a hircine bacchanal

and of—nodding off—the hollow wavering of the last primal bleat.

Still, in the morn, with the rise of the sun,

the whole lot of us awake in a hallowed dawn—

the spy and pedagogue, the reeler and reeled and reeling,

denizens of then and thence,

the digger, the finder, the keeper—

should each be wakeful in our turn, then well gathered,

as the gourd smolders and the vultures have ceased

and the stalker slinks, sinks, stingless, from the returned—

now, arise, on the brink of grace, ye saints, all.