Two Poems Called "All Saints' Day"

Seven years ago, I was inspired to write a poem on the Feast of All Saints, i.e., November 1st. Today I got the same urge. I thought I'd post both poems:


All Saints' Day (November 1, 2003)

This morning is cold and empty.
Last night’s decorations, the scarecrow on that porch,
the black cat cutout in this yard,
lay dead now—their ghoulish souls vanished ‘til
incantations at next summer’s campfires call them back to life.

Here the gory entrails of a pumpkin strew a gutter;
here yolk splatters a driveway;
here toilet paper clings like stale bandages to a skeletal tree.

As usual, the ghosts have gorged and titillated and made flight
before the frost descends
on the wrinkling pumpkin rot of unflickering cackles,
on the husks of bare vines in razed fields outside of town,
on the damp leaves clumped in the brown grass,

crystallizing time,
revealing what still moves in their absence.



All Saints' Day (November 1, 2010)

3 pm in Manila.

On Katipunan Street a man tries to sell me an umbrella the size of a golf course; half a block later, his tag-a-long grandchildren shout at me—brazenly, shyly—in Tagalog. Then they dash away, screaming giddy that such wickedness could come through them.

The banks are closed today. “Tomorrow, sir,” says the lonely guard, when I ask about exchanging Korean won. “You come back tomorrow.”

My sidecar ride back is fast, the streets being empty and the driver anxious to unloose his horsepower on the motorbike. My head nearly hits the roof.

“It’s raining,” says the gateman to me, a note of amusement in his voice, as he raises the crossbar for my gimpy, grocery-laden gait. And so it is. It’s raining. Not a fierce night-train typhoon like we’ve been having recently, but a soft rain, like a lamb’s fleece tossed into the air to unfurl, falling gently to rest upon the place beneath.

Across the street, under the carport, a dog perspires in his afternoon nap. He lays on his side on the cement, breathing slowly, regularly. He’s some kind of beagle or basset hound—probably the very dog that Socrates swore by in Athens. It’s enough to make a fellow wonder: O dog, where are you now? And what is your secret? All the people missing today, out at the cemeteries, are they going to notice you when they get back? The dog doesn’t answer; he just sleeps away to the patter of the rain on the roofs and cars and telecom poles and leaves and grass and the hardened patch of cement suffering Chinese water torture under the runoff spout, until he’ll wake up, shake himself off, and get about his business.