ALL HALLOWS

These powerful days around the Celtic New Year have always pulled at my soul.  Today is All Saints Day or All Hallows.  I remember a poem of Louise Gluck's that I loved many years ago.  I'd say it's haunted me ever since I first read it and remains a favorite, although I've found her later work less compelling.  My sequence HALLOWS follows Gluck's poem.  This was written for my grandmother, who is the "saint" in the second section;  the third honors All Souls Day, also known as El Dia de Los Muertos in Mexico and Central America.  For All Souls Day (tomorrow), I will share a poem by my friend Glenda Beall, who lives in Hayesville, North Carolina


ALL HALLOWS

Even now this landscape is assembling. The hills darken. The oxen Sleep in their blue yoke, The fields having been Picked clean, the sheaves Bound evenly and piled at the roadside Among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises: This is the barrenness Of harvest or pestilence And the wife leaning out the window With her hand extended, as in payment, And the seeds Distinct, gold, calling Come here Come here, little one And the soul creeps out of the tree. Louise Gluck    Hallows 1.              These leaves at my window, death-speckled black oak and blood-maple, fall to the earth into which she was sealed, leaving me to imagine I see through the hollows  of what were her eyes how another day  breaks on the backs of the scrub pines that stand up to welcome it. 2.         She was no saint. She never fasted, and if she prayed,  I never heard her aside from the Lawsy she uttered as down she sank onto the dark of the chamber pot  while I tried to be sleeping. She stirred up the fire to a roar every morning and beat the dough smooth, shoved it into the oven to bake and be eaten. When I hear Pavarotti  sing Panis Angelicus,  I see her hands deep in the dough bowl, and I hear the fire in the stove rumble, I hear her clucking and sighing, she who could never on this earth deliver unto any table a dry piece of cornbread, whose old-fashioned cakes that lay solid as flesh on the  plates put to shame every paper-thin slice of the town-ladies’ angelfood cakes. Any honest- to-god  angel  would have preferred them, a dollop of whipped cream atop every thick slice and after that, oh,  just a touch of  her Christmas divinity. 3.            Los Muertos.  The dead. They are out there this morning,  in the woods with the busy  squirrels  laying up treasures on earth,  this  heaven of acorns and walnuts. This granary. These last dawns before the leaves go, I wake early to watch from the window my  dead ones out there in the woods leaf by  leaf come to rest on the ground  where at last they have nothing  to say beyond what’s meant  to lie on the earth and be claimed by it. from Coming To Rest, LSU Press