Feast of All Souls
An old friend used to say, if you bury it deep enough
the pain goes away. This was back in college.
Jaded, we smoked black-papered cigarettes &
kept top-ten lists of the ways the world might end—
do I have to say more? I haven’t thought of him
in years, but here it is two days past Samhain,
the night leather jacket dark & I can’t get his voice
or his low, rueful laughter out of my head.
He loved autumn & a young woman who never
even knew his name or how he felt. Love’s easy
from afar. The leaves in the yard settle
in the low patches of the lawn, slowly
decompose. To rake or to compost? Bonfire
smoke sewn through the air. Earlier,
my son & I worked his yard, which had been left
untended for years, & there beneath the weeds
& wild grasses lay pavers from a patio
long forgotten. How quickly the man-made world
returns to wilding—leaf rot to dirt to seed. Repeat.
In Central American jungles archaeologists
discover lost cities using LIDAR, & what was
once considered tall hills have proven to be pyramids.
No one knows what happened to that civilization
& really it’s not important: it’s gone,
& the trees & animals returned without record
or fanfare. Now the researchers will come,
with camera bags & computers, their brushes & shovels.
That friend used to love Mayan culture, said
the world would end in December 2012
& how cool it was that he’d be alive to see it.
He wasn’t. He’d have laughed at such irony. Last year
my son uncovered a small gravestone where a family
had buried their infant in his lot nearly a century before.
Olive Dickel. The marker had fallen over.
Then the overgrowth. Sometimes I try to imagine
the anguish of those parents, the father shoveling
the small hole in the almost unbreakable February soil,
his calloused hands shaking—let’s say, with cold.
A harder time we’re lucky enough to not live in.
How deep did he have to dig to hide that hurt?
Whatever the rest of the story, it’s not mine to tell,
Nor my son’s. We live in an era of celebrity
archaeologists with TV shows dedicated to vaults
of skulls & broken jawbones unearthed in jungle pyramids.
Human history uncertain & violent. November wind
comes with teeth bared & Halloween’s pumpkins
begin their slow rot on neighborhood porches.
My son & I used to carve jack o’lanterns
when he’d still trick or treat. We’d open the cranium
scoop out the seeds & pulp before cutting out jagged smiles
& eyes. Was the dwindling candle meant to be its soul?
Once, looking at that lit-up face, Alex said
it didn’t seem scary at all; it just looked undecided,
as if somewhere between ruin & laughter.
*
Gerry LaFemina is the author of over twenty books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. The recipient of awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, he teaches at Frostburg State University and in the MFA Program at Carlow University. He’s also the frontman and principal songwriter of The Downstrokes.
