Day 37 | Totem by Eamon Grennan

Day 42 | Totem by Eamon Grennan

Day 24 | Incident by Eamon Grennan

Day 24 | Incident by Eamon Grennan

Day 108 | Incident by Eamon Grennan

Day 24 | Incident by Eamon Grennan.

Day 42 | Totem by Eamon Grennan

Totem
Eamon Grennan

All Souls’ over, the roast seeds eaten, I set

on a backporch post our sculpted pumpkin

under the weather, warm still for November.

Night and day it gapes in at us

through the kitchen window, going soft

in the head. Sleepwalker-slow, a black rash of ants

harrows this hollow globe, munching

the pale peach flesh, sucking its seasoned

last juices dry. In a week, when the ants and

humming flies are done, only a hard remorseless light

drills and tenants it through and through. Within,

it turns mould-black in patches, stays

days like this while the weather takes it

in its shifty arms: wide eye-spaces shine,

the disapproving mouth holds firm. Another week,

a sad leap forward: sunk to one side

so an eye-socket’s almost blocked, it becomes

a monster of its former self. Human, it would have

rotted beyond unhappiness and horror

to some unspeakable subject state—its nose

no more than a vertical hole, the thin

bridge of amber between nose and mouth

in ruins. The other socket opens

wider than ever: disbelief.

                                        It’s all downhill

from here: knuckles of sun, peremptory

steady fingers of frost, strain all day and night—

cracking the rind, kneading the knotted fibres

free. The crown, with its top-knot mockery

of stalk, caves in; the skull buckles; the whole

sad head drips tallowy tears: the end

is in sight. In a day or two it topples on itself

like ruined thatch, pus-white drool spidering

from the corner of the mouth, worming its way

down the body-post. All dignity to the winds,

it bows its bogeyman face of dread

to the inevitable.

                           And now, November almost out,

it is in the bright unseasonable sunshine

a simmer of pulp, a slow bake, amber shell speckled

chalk-grey with lichen. Light strikes and strikes

its burst surfaces: it sags, stays at the end of

its brief tether—a helmet of dark circles, death caul.

Here is the last umbilical gasp, everybody’s

nightmare parent, the pitiless system

rubbing our noses in it. But pity poor lantern-head

with his lights out, glob by greasy glob

going back where he came from: as each seed-shaped

drop falls free, it catches and clutches

for one split second the light. When the pumpkin

lapses to our common ground at last—where

a swaddle of snow will fold it in no time

from sight—I try to take in the empty space it’s left

on top of the wooden post: it is that empty space.

Day 24 | Incident by Eamon Grennan

Incident
Eamon Grennan

for Louis Asekoff

Mid-October, Massachusetts. We drive

through the livid innards of a beast—dragon

or salamander—whose home is fire. The hills

a witch’s quilt of goldrust, flushed cinnamon,

wine fever, hectic lemon. After dark,

while water ruffles, salted, in a big pot, we four

gather towards the woodfire, exchanging

lazy sentences, waiting dinner. Sunk

in the supermarket cardboard box,

the four lobsters tip and coolly stroke each other

with rockblue baton legs and tentative

antennae, their breath a wet clicking, the undulant

slow shift of their plated bodies

like the doped drift of patients

in the padded ward. Eyes like squished berries

out on stalks. It’s the end of the line

for them, yet faintly in that close-companioned air

they smell the sea, a shadow-haunted hole to hide in

till all this blows over.

                                     When it’s time,

we turn the music up to nerve us

to it, then take them one by one and drop

in the salty roil and scald, then clamp

the big lid back. Grasping the shapely fantail,

I plunge mine in headfirst and feel

before I can detach myself the flat slap

of a jackknifed back, glimpse for an instant

before I put the lid on it

the rigid backward bow-bend of the whole body

as the brain explodes and lidless eyes

sear white. We two are bound in silence

till the pot-lid planks back and music

floods again, like a tide. Minutes later,

the four of us bend to brittle pink intricate

shells, drawing white sweet flesh

with our fingers, sewing our shroud-talk

tight about us. Later, near moonless midnight,

when I scrape the leafbright broken remains

into the garbage can outside, that last

knowing spasm eels up my arm again

and off, like a flash, across the rueful stars.