Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.

And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.
~Louise Glück “All Hallows”

All houses wherein men have lived and died
Are haunted houses. Through the open doors
The harmless phantoms on their errands glide,
With feet that make no sound upon the floors.

We meet them at the door-way, on the stair,
Along the passages they come and go,
Impalpable impressions on the air,
A sense of something moving to and fro.

There are more guests at table than the hosts
Invited; the illuminated hall
Is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts,
As silent as the pictures on the wall.

The stranger at my fireside cannot see
The forms I see, nor hear the sounds I hear;
He but perceives what is; while unto me
All that has been is visible and clear…

…So from the world of spirits there descends
A bridge of light, connecting it with this,
O’er whose unsteady floor, that sways and bends,
Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow from “Haunted Houses”

Most of the apples have already fallen.
The sunflowers turn into dusty spiked balls.
But what if my land is the land of the living?
The bird from the dust takes flight
Then turns multiple—

A handful of birds rising in the dead sky
Opened to receive them.
But my loves for now are here and living, and I want more of them.
Like the bird on the ground I pick what I need from the dust.
~Lindsay Turner from Halloween

The old trees on this farm have souls,
bearing fruit for all to enjoy,
the deer, the raccoons, the birds, our family.

Rarely, when one topples in a windstorm,
its 100-plus years of fruitfulness abruptly ended,
I sense its soul’s return to the dust beneath,
sinking back to the roots
which held firm through many storms,
its hollow trunk now a telescope to the beyond.

Goodbye, sweet broken soul.
To dust we someday return
until called back to fruitfulness…

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.
~ Maya Angelou from “When Great Trees Fall”