Halloween

by Thomas Rabbitt

When at last the sleet began to strike
My window, I pulled back. Ice shattered
Itself as if it could destroy the reflecting glass
And me behind it. Ice soon greased each spike
Of the black fence, each delinquent leaf in a battery
Of bleared hope, cruel Christ’s bright and suffocating mass.
Against my tongue the parlor window stuck like ice.
Against my eyes the cold panes wore a smudge
Of lips, my name erased, a grillwork lace
Of tic-tac-toe rubbed out. Could I begrudge
God’s wrath its weather? Rain should have been blood,
Red fog on the moon, not His wet ghost climbing
From the graveyard to fill my cold childhood
With a face like my own, glaring through the skull of time.

                                                             —from Prepositional Heaven (River City, 2001)


The author of several books of poems—including Exile (1975), The Booth Interstate (1981), The Abandoned Country (1988), Enemies of the State  (2000), and Prepositional Heaven (2001) — Thomas Rabbitt has retired from his teaching career and currently lives and writes in Tennessee.  In 1972, he founded the MFA program in creative writing at The University of Alabama.  In Fall 2004 NewSouth Books will release American Wake: New & Selected Poems.

selected by Dan Albergotti