October 2021
Bio Note: My name reveals my French heritage but I am equal parts Irish--my mother's parents were both born and raised in Ireland and I have always enjoyed the Celtic holiday of Halloween and always find some way to mark it. I also mark the anniversary of the loss of loved ones, though often only to myself. Culturally, Americans are conditioned not to look back and as a group we do not mark such anniversaries, though many other cultures do. These two poems are included in my collection Crave (from NYQ Books); my other full-length books are Appetite for the Divine and Remorseless Loyalty (both from Ashland Poetry Press).
Jack
Years have passed since I last entered
a church to be a part of those rituals
of chant, vestment, statuary, and incense
from which I am also descended, yet
October ends and I find myself
elbow-deep in a vegetable once again,
scooping out the skull of a jack-o’-lantern
hands slicked with the vivid mess, acolyte
to the animate knife, eager for that lurid face
blazing its eyes against the long, deep dark.
Anniversary
for my father
Jews call it yarhtzeit,
the Bangladeshi shraadh.
Intent as we are with
getting over, getting on,
Americans have no term.
October again, and the trees
make such a pageantry of loss:
orpiment, vermilion, cadmium leaves
quiver in the steel wind
that bites them free.
In the long remembering of trees
you are nearly there
where you are not, and have not
been some nine years now.
I am at home here
in the cascade
of their radiant perishing.
©2021 Christine Gelineau
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