The spookiest thing about Halloween? That its frights and frissons are based on a simple and scary truth: we humans are the source of the villainies that pose the gravest dangers to us, as well as being the easiest mark for them. Be very afraid!
That House on Our Street
The doorway was a toothy maw, the casement was an eye,
and all the children crept in awe each time they must pass by,
regardless what they heard or saw; they knew that they would die
if anything at all should draw them in, no matter why,
For bogeys, fiends and ghastly ghouls inhabited the place,
entrapping and devouring fools, and set on them apace;
those children who had left their schools and homes without a trace
now lay decaying in deep pools as dark as outer space,
Dug in the basement deep below, a catacomb of holes
filled up with youth who’d tried to go into this cage of souls
and found, not fun adventures, no, but rather, evil moles
of spirit-kind hid here–and so, for them the town bell tolls;
Lost children wail twixt yonder walls at night while moonlight creeps,
and roam like mists down endless halls while all around them sleeps;
no knowing parent ever calls again; the mansion keeps
its secrets tight, and silence falls, far as the deepest deeps;
At least, the children’s fears said so; the legend kept in thrall
the children thereabouts, who’d go timidly past it all
at anxious speed along the row, lest they lose their recall
to safety. As grownups all know: life’s scary when you’re small!
The Jitters
Remember the years when we were young
And captive among our babysitters?
Sheer terror would reign with its horrid thrill,
The unspeakable chill we would call the Jitters.
Under the bed or under the house,
A mouse isn’t safe when the Jitters gleam
Reptilian fangs and rhinoceros horns;
O! The scorns we would risk to release a scream!
Anything dark and anywhere doored
Could harbor a horde of Jittery creeps;
They hide under blankets and lurk behind stones:
The wrack in the bones that never sleeps.
Do I hear the wind? Did you hear an owl?
Or was it the howl of the restless dead?
The moan of a sailor just as he drowned?
All around are the sounds of the things we dread.
That flickering light! The curtains a-moving,
And both of them proving that something is near:
We’d writhe in our agonies, plagued by deceptions
And all the perceptions of what we fear.
This, you remember, was life with the Unknown,
And all of the fun known as children was moot
Whenever night fell or a stranger came calling;
Appalling how it never stopped its pursuit.
Now deep in adulthood, responsible, sane,
We scoff at the pain of those gibbers and twitters,
Yet get us alone, in a vulnerable state,
And sooner or late, we succumb to the Jitters.
Endless Falling
A whisper in the gloaming just pre-dawn
A shiver or a prickling on the neck
A flutter of the eyelid, quick, then gone
And hope of any sleep is now a wreck
Above me in the dark are broken dreams
Above my brow an icicle of fear
Above the awful emptiness, the screams
In silent agony are all I hear
And under all this brittle disarray
And under skin and in the bone and soul
And under some enchantment, night and day
I know this wickedness will eat me whole
Against the dangers present in this fright
Against the door of Death I’ll knock tonight
Inquisition
Her lipstick was of fiery red,
Her mane wild copper, and her nails
Lacquered in scarlet by which pales
The rouge of which the pious said
Was made civilization’s end,
And surely, in her crimson silk
Cut down to there, she and her ilk
Wore carmine on that downward trend
That would someday blood’s red require
As she and they leapt in that fire
In meantime, sanguine all were those,
This ruby dame and all her kin,
And painted red from cloak to skin,
Until the bloom wore off the rose
And in wine-tinged despair, demise,
They fell in desperate gasps for breath,
Plagued by their past like some Red Death
Infected them; to their surprise,
This day their bad blood did require
They leap in that eternal fire
Desolation
Way out west of Petaluma,
Where the streetlights cease to go,
Only weeds and broken concrete
And barbed wire in one hard row
Braiding up the roadside grasses
In a knotted wind-strung quirt
To whip out and give ten lashes
To the devils in the dirt
There are houses still beyond here,
Long abandoned, though, and shot
Through with rust and melancholy
And dead dreams long since forgot,
And one tough and stringy lady
Hanging on by fingernails
To a past she can’t remember,
Out here where the flat wind sails
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Her Monument
In a strange little homestead lit by electric light
is a passing builder’s fancy floating in the neon night;
the spirit of the artisan flits by, nocturnal blue,
and shoots the moon by swooping through the ashes in the flue;
she drifts in starry glimmerings beyond the crooked room
where comet dust is settling on the folly of her tomb. O,
let lie the tools of wisdom where your little homestead rises,
and cry Hurrah! for moonlit nights
and foolish enterprises.
Moths have a potent duality of effects on me: they attract and repel with just about equal force. On the one hand, there is their Victorian opulence of velvet wings and ostrich-feathered antennae and their widely looping sweeps of flight as if borne effortlessly on air currents themselves rather than lofting on and above them under power. They can look like jewels tossed into the air or, as hawk moths can sometimes do, trick the unwary watcher into thinking they’re bright, buzzing hummingbirds on the wing.
On the other hand, that sort of squishy, bloated, heavy softness of moths’ bodies and their voracious appetites for things I’d rather have kept to myself (dry goods in the pantry, tender leaves in the garden, and favorite fine woolens) fills me with nervousness that makes the revulsion they inspire in horror stories utterly plausible to me. I can’t help but remember the sweltering summer night when I was young and my family, having been out for a happy holiday evening, stopped at the local gas station to refill the bottomless tank of our giant station wagon; since it was so sweltering, we all piled out of the car to go into the tiny, grubby cashier’s hut where an electric fan was humming and, having an uneasy sense of something untoward behind me, I turned around to see a veritable dust storm of fat moths, attracted by the shop’s fluorescent lights, throwing themselves in spongy, flapping frenzy at the glaring glass until it was almost opaque with their wing-scale dust. Oh, yes, and the fabulously nasty short story ‘The Cocoon’ (John B. L. Goodwin) has never quite left my subconscious mind (awake or asleep) once I read it a few decades ago.
On top of all this, I married a guy who had once had a small moth fly into his ear, get caught and frantic, and instead of finding its way out, worked its creepy, fluttering way right down to beat against his eardrum until a doctor could eventually get the creature out of there. Enough said. I can still look, at times, with a certain dispassionate interest and think of moths as intriguing bits of scientific wonder and visual astonishment, and then I must quickly look away again and reassure myself that there’s not something truly wrong with them. I did at least decide to write a little bit to see if, in the incident of the attack on my husband’s ear, I could imagine the experience from the moth’s point of view.
Labyrinth
I crawled the narrow halls in
Darkness ever deepening,
Thinking I might find some clear way through
But too tightly fitted in, too close,
No chance of going back or backing out,
No scent I could recognize to bring me
Back to the distant shore,
No vision, not a speck of spectral light to give
A guide around those curves crepuscular, those turns
Winding ever more toward claustrophobia, to where
The heat was growing more intense, the sound
Of a pulsing drum seeming to speak of waves, making
Me dream the ocean lay ahead—but behind me, in
The now impenetrable night, some Thing, a dragon
It seemed to me, began to drown the liquid lure
Of the drumbeat ahead with its own more frightful,
Louder noise, and then to scrabble wildly at me
With its terrifying claws, at which it seemed
The labyrinth must finally swallow me and
Draw me down into its fatal end—but then—
In a turn of events that was quite shockingly detached
From any turns my path had made
Thus far, the whole puzzling place tipped
Over on its side—there I lay, too fixed
In the halls’ constricting ways to turn and follow or
To roll, and the sea broke forth on me at last, a rush
Of saline waves tearing upon me, heaving me out
Of where I’d wedged, and in a cataract, sent me
Blasting right back through all the sightless turns
Of that preternatural dark, shot me with my sodden
Useless wings back into blazing day where I
Could lie, quivering faintly in my long-lost world,
Deciding whether it was time to die or time
To spread my fragile wings and see
If there was any life left in them.
Missing You
The kettle on the hob is hissing
Without cease, for Kettie’s missing—
She dashed out to check the door
And hasn’t come back anymore;
Although we saw a pair of shoes
And stockinged legs amid the ooze,
Heels up, in yon green murky swamp,
We dasn’t get our own shoes damp
By plunging toward her in the rough
Glutinous muck, and soon enough
The heels stopped kicking anyhow.
No one will come for coffee now,
For though ‘twas us stood at her door,
She slipped; shan’t visit anymore.
Slightly Bent
Emmylou and Louie went
To town together long ago—
They went to town, for all we know;
Although they both were slightly bent,
We think they just went off to town,
Not that they were bumped off, ambushed,
Stabbed, poisoned, or shot down;
But given they were slightly bent,
Our finding them quite stone cold dead
Was not a shock, it must be said,
So we’re not certain where they went
Or what they did or what it meant
Or whether in the town or out,
Or if some others were about
That had a slightly different bent,
But anyway, the two are dead,
Both of them, Emmylou and Louie,
And lest I should become all gooey,
That’s the whole that need be said.
Ghost Images
Grey misty days, indigo nights and wind that whips up suddenly
without a seeming cause, are frights only to those who’d turn and flee
at provocations slim, and slightest hints of something shadowy
But I am not afraid of these faint shades and palely passing things,
instead, I wonder if they freeze in fear at me, these souls whose wings
are clipped, and on whose quaking knees are bent, to hide from mortal stings
We are, it seems, all fearfullest of that unlike what we know most,
what is familiar and best, no matter if it is a ghost
or is a friend at whose behest we once raised up our happy toast
Yet have forgot, when he is dead, and think we ought to fear him now
as though he were a cause for dread whom we once loved and would allow
was more than harmless, bless his head, and still should seek him anyhow
For company, remembered, gone, or living still, or even sheer,
transparent spirit of someone who longs enough to reappear
among us present ought to own our welcome without needless fear
The world we see and what we know are far from all that there can be,
and far from all that’s good, and so we ought to revel joyfully
when spirit friends or living, should seek out our simple company
So as the night begins to fall, or wind kick up, or day grow cold,
and chill our souls, hark to the call of friends quite new or ancient-old;
embrace their spirits one and all, and only happy tales be told
Both of those living or long fled, whether of days in blazing bright
sunshine, or seeming dark as dread, or else the middle of the night,
for all companions should be led to know they fill our hearts with light . . .
Art-Colored Glasses 