Pumpkinode

For Pierre Bennerup of Sunny Border Nurseries in Kensington, Connecticut, who didn't know what a "stook" was; remembering our young days in his father's fields, and for Frances Sinderwahl, whose e-mail message yesterday made me think of this.

 

         I have always wanted to write

                           a poem about a

                  pumpkin.  It is one of those

         impossible subjects.  You know

the feeling, left over from childhood's

 

         fantasies of what childhood is

                           like.  Come the Indian

                  summer of any year, 'mums

         and trees burning their clean colors

into the air, one thinks of

 

         all seasons, past and future, but

                           particularly of

                  the pumpkin, Ceres' good Jack,

         grinning his candlepower in-

to the scarecrow's menace.  Northern spies

 

         engage in autumnal intrigue;

                           winesaps hit the local

                  cider mills, and there's a witch

         in every stook.

                                        Cozy, but the

real spice lies with that vandal made of

 

         air, the empty ghost our scarecrows

                           cannot frighten.  August:

                  the field is a tangle of

         sunlight wound in vines, covered with

pillows of foliage.  Blossoms flare

 

         briefly, then fall.  Green nodes take their

                           place, begin to swell.  Then,

                  the infant pumpkins seem to

         disappear.  The patch is a great

green whirligig of tendril and vine.

 

         One night, only the moon watching,

                           magic occurs.  The dawn

                  finds the bright globes lying in

         windrows, clinging to tangles of

brown twine.  Next, even the vines crumble

 

         into film.  We take October's

                           flesh and make it grin.  We

                  set it in our window to

         frighten shadows with a hollow shell,

but wind seeps in, and the flame wavers. 

Originally published in The Quest, iiL2, Summer 1967 and collected in Awaken, Bells Falling, Poems 1959-1968, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1968, and in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems 1959-2007, Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, 2007, copyright Lewis Turco, all rights reserved.

 

Originally published in The Quest, ii:2, Summer 1967