Totem

All Souls’ over, the roast seeds eaten, I set 
on a backporch post our sculpted pumpkin 
under the weather, warm still for November. 
Night and day it gapes in at us
through the kitchen window, going soft
in the head. Sleepwalker-slow, a black rash of ants 
harrows this hollow globe, munching 
the pale peach flesh, sucking its seasoned 
last juices dry. In a week, when the ants and 
humming flies are done, only a hard remorseless light 
drills and tenants it through and through. Within, 
it turns mould-black in patches, stays 
days like this while the weather takes it 
in its shifty arms: wide eye-spaces shine, 
the disapproving mouth holds firm. Another week, 
a sad leap forward: sunk to one side
so an eye-socket’s almost blocked, it becomes
a monster of its former self. Human, it would have 
rotted beyond unhappiness and horror 
to some unspeakable subject state—its nose 
no more than a vertical hole, the thin 
bridge of amber between nose and mouth 
in ruins. The other socket opens
wider than ever: disbelief.
  It’s all downhill
from here: knuckles of sun, peremptory
steady fingers of frost, strain all day and night—
cracking the rind, kneading the knotted fibres 
free. The crown, with its top-knot mockery 
of stalk, caves in; the skull buckles; the whole 
sad head drips tallowy tears: the end
is in sight. In a day or two it topples on itself 
like ruined thatch, pus-white drool spidering 
from the corner of the mouth, worming its way
down the body-post. All dignity to the winds, 
it bows its bogeyman face of dread
to the inevitable.
 And now, November almost out, 
it is in the bright unseasonable sunshine
a simmer of pulp, a slow bake, amber shell speckled 
chalk-grey with lichen. Light strikes and strikes 
its burst surfaces: it sags, stays at the end of 
its brief tether—a helmet of dark circles, death caul. 
Here is the last umbilical gasp, everybody’s 
nightmare parent, the pitiless system
rubbing our noses in it. But pity poor lantern-head 
with his lights out, glob by greasy glob
going back where he came from: as each seed-shaped 
drop falls free, it catches and clutches
for one split second the light. When the pumpkin 
lapses to our common ground at last—where 
a swaddle of snow will fold it in no time
from sight—I try to take in the empty space it’s left 
on top of the wooden post: it is that empty space.