It is the night of the dead of the night.
I fumble for the triggers of my household ghosts,
Gone to gods, my father who sometimes called me Lad,
And my grandfather who until I was thirty called
me Boy.
Soon my father is fiddling, fiddling with his
Jugular bolts in the foyer. Grandfather muses
about where he
Left his cape and noisily files his teeth with a
rasp.
Remember Yeats?
He longed to sleep on a wooden board
To discipline himself. Tonight I love him, lay out
wine for my dead,
Who drink when I set my glass down, sipping my
breath
With their avid senses, playing impossible pre‑physics
tricks,
Enamored with the ways I scratch and waste time
I later recall as being charged with meaning.
My ghosts of value! Oh wavering accountants!
Outside, the miked pumpkin moans the open vowels
Of Rachmaninoff's Vocalese, that totemic,
pulmonary, grim song.
Toys scattered across the grass roughly
Symmetrize our son's failed mission to the moon:
A no‑terrain vehicle upended on a tree‑root,
a spade,
A strainer and a sunflower pennant stuck in sand,
His one small leap across the front yard.
He is outside, waving the steel Army‑issue
whistle
My father never got to give him.
My wife wears her hair down like a willow.
Other houses on the street sit back, gasping. It
is
Enough for them to have sent their envoys to our
rite:
The slow girl dressed as a tango dancer, a fiddler
crab,
A cat and a red‑headed Ninja. Another father
is dressed
As Alice Cooper, with scrawled‑on eyeliner
tear tracks
And a tiny laughing bag hidden beneath his coat.
We pass among trees made silver. A word made
unanswered.
The cowboy who is also my son shows his candy to
Death
Who comes as the boy in black from across the
street,
With a
black mesh face, and an unwhistling paper scythe.