All Saints' Day
Music is simply decorated time—Sparrow
Friday night, at the Michael Franti show, I see my two grief counselors.
We group-hug and laugh about meeting each other out in the world.
The opener is a solo performer, guitar and a pair of didgeridoos
like tusks booming the deep-throated call of Aboriginal time.
When Franti leads a conga line through the crowd, I put my hand
on his sweaty shoulder. For a moment, we sway in time together.
Driving home, three thousand miles west of Tintern Abbey, I play
Warren Haynes and Railroad Earth performing 'Spots of Time.'
Time was, I had a playlist called The Well of Melancholy, full of
Jason Isbell’s existential angst and Lucinda Williams torch songs.
For the first time in months, I pull it up, and R.E.M. comes on.
All the way home, I replay 'Everybody Hurts,' with those rich
strings recalling a friend who played cello, gone much too young.
And Michael Stipe’s nasal voice is still echoing in my head
when we gather on Sunday, blurring with the voices of choir
and congregation until they drown in the organ crescendo
rising toward the angel band, the church triumphant and eternal
looking down at rows of guttering candles. Then stillness
as the names are read. Each one a brief shock, more or less.
This year no beloved, some dear almost-friends,
others whom I barely recall having passed
into the deep silence of dream time.
David E. Poston is the author of two poetry chapbooks, including Postmodern Bourgeois Poetaster Blues (which won the NC Writers’ Network’s Randall Jarrell Chapbook Award), and the full-length collection Slow of Study. His poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in Atlanta Review, Pedestal, Cider Press Review, Pembroke Magazine, The Southern Poetry Anthology, VII: North Carolina, Typehouse, and other journals and anthologies. A new poetry collection, Letting Go, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press in fall 2025.
Amethyst Review 