Father, he really is you,
the jack-o-lantern man
whose eyes and jagged mouth flare
as you turn on the current
to the socket in his head;

whose ghostly body
draped on a wooden crosspiece
flies down the wire on a pulley,
swoops from our dark front porch
to the sidewalk below,
terrifying trick-or-treaters.

You cover your mouth, muffling
your giggles as they scream and run,
turning for applause to where I watch
from behind the rhododendron.

I, too, wait eagerly for the innocent,
for the unleashing of your creature,
your ungodly howl as he descends.

He really is you,
sliding down,
	    pulled back
to be born again and again,
grinning from the dark.

	for my father

Dad kept yellow corn from the feed store
in a garbage can out behind the shed.
Dawn and dusk, he shoved a rusty scoop 
deep into that can, dumping hard kernels
of boyhood memory on the family farm
into a galvanized pail.

Then he sniffed the wind and nickered
until two horses crossed the neighbor’s field 
to rest their muzzles on the split-rail fence
and talk to him.

And he made more horse noises, 
grinning back as they curled floppy lips 
to bare big teeth and munch this ritual gift 
from an old man lost in his yard, 
who raised that steel bucket
as if to his own mouth.

Some years, my father made a garden
along the creek out back, carried
topsoil from the woods that crept
to our yard’s edge, cut sticks for vines,
and made the creek’s edge ripen
with pole beans, wax beans, 
floppy heads of lettuce, and tomatoes 
that burst like planets from green clouds.

I don’t remember when the houses came
to take the fields and woods behind our house, 
to tame the creek into a culvert where it lost 
the clay we used to scoop from its gray banks, 
the turtles, and the tadpoles that we trapped 
in jars of silted water—and then let go.

But I know that’s when my father 
gave up on the garden, seeded his lawn 
like all the rest, though he sometimes stood 
where it had been, listening for wind 
in trees that were no more,
and the song of running water.

Today as I think of his ashes
neatly packaged on my closet shelf
waiting to join my mother’s
in the family plot,

I honor his garden, wanting
to dig up the grass and find good soil again, 
then let it crumble through my fingers
as I gently give him back
to what he lost.