Pumpkin Tattoo

Here is my most recent poem, written in the waning days of our summer sojourn in Maine.
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PUMPKIN TATTOO

In the portraits of that house, the windows
are eyes or pieces of the soul almost.
Andrew Wyeth

I am feeling autumnal.

Traveling those Pennsylvania back roads
a dozen times or more I wandered over
the Brandywine’s tranquil oxbows,
looking high and low for the Hill Girt Farm,
thinking that October’s flaming cedars
would lead me to that elusive pumpkin patch.
You told me where to go, when to turn
and where. But where was it? I was lost.

It was far easier to find this old house
among Cushing’s saltwater farms,
here on the foggy margin on Hathorn Point.
We stare deep into the St. George River,
studying the subtleties of the blue distant sea,
the smoky approaches of a sou’wester.
It helps having you here this time around, you
who know all the stories of his time here.
You called him Old Bones, he wanted you to,
and you recall him in his younger days when
he would wander these dry, dusty upstairs rooms.
We look through twelve-paned window at the field
where he watched Christina slowly crab-walk
from the small graveyard down on the point, here
to this weather-worn house encased in clapboard,
grown winter gray-scarred and summer burnished.
There, on the point, her bones now find final rest
in hard-scrabble soil through the seasons of forty years.
The day before they buried her he returned here
in January darkness, wandering these empty rooms,
trying hard to ignore the clatter of the jackhammer
opening her frozen grave, perhaps pondering that day
when frost would heave his own bones next to hers.

And now I watch you wandering through the old
and desiccated house, past the long cold Glenwood
stove, beyond the blue door scratched and rub by age,
I see the pumpkin tattoo etched above your tail bone,
the one you wanted since you were a young girl
wandering those Pennsylvania byways in autumn,
reminding me of my own search for Hill Girt Farm,
that pumpkin patch with the haunting faces carved
in stacked jack-o-lanterns, their bright orange slitted
eyes and tilted smiles glowing as if beacons from
beyond that grave down on the point, the old man’s
bones home to rest though his soul still wanders here.
In these darkening upstairs rooms we sit quietly,
together we watch the gentle sea breeze trifle
with the same moldering muslin through which he watched
her drag herself through the summer timothy, with each
hint of wind the dust of eternity settling over us.