Nothing in Dave Bonta's "Hallow's Eve" jumps out from behind a tree. There are no ghosts or costumes, only a woman with a rottweiler and a gravedigger on a small backhoe. The title promises the night when the dead are supposed to walk, but the poem gives us a cemetery on an ordinary day, and the scariest thing in it is something the speaker tells himself not to look at.
The form is as plain as the scene. The poem is nine couplets with no punctuation, no capital letters except one, and no rhyme. The speaker is a lowercase "i" who strolls and observes without pausing for emphasis. The line breaks do the work that commas would. "A woman lets / her rottweiler run" stops on "lets," so the permission arrives before the dog does. "Teeth waiting for the other / jaw to descend" leaves "the other" hanging for a moment, and the reader has to wait for the jaw. The even two-line stanzas also look a little like rows of graves, though that may be my reading rather than the poet's intention. The short lines and flat, deadpan statements ("in the real world / hills are for cemeteries") make the poem sound like a shrug, which lets its stranger images slip in unannounced.
Those images share a theme, because nearly all of them turn the landscape into a body. From a distance the gravestones look like stumps, then like teeth in a jaw. Up close they become "spines of books," and by the end the mountain has "a growing rash." Teeth, spines and skin make a small anatomy of the poem, so the hill and the mountain start to feel like living things that are decaying or sick. The comparisons also move between the natural and the made. Stones look like cut trees, and stones look like books. The dead are things to be read, and the land is a body that can break out in a rash.
The poem's most interesting moment is the single capitalised word. "GIVEN says one," meaning one headstone, and the speaker feels guilty "for killing time." On a stone, "Given" is most likely a surname, though the poem never says so. It also reads as the plain word, as in what has been given to us, which is life and time. The speaker is browsing stones like a shopper and idly killing time among people whose time has run out, and a word he happens to read makes him feel the contrast. The verbs "browse" and "killing" are casual and a little rude to the dead, and the poem lets us notice that without any lecture.
Then comes the turn. "Try not to look over / at the mountain" is an instruction, and the speaker gives it to himself, which of course makes us look. The "stumps" from the second stanza return, now literal: "its growing rash / of fresh stumps." The word has been planted early so that we recognise it when it comes back. The graveyard stumps were only a simile, but the mountain's are real. Judging by the imagery, they suggest felled trees, perhaps logging or clearing, though the poem never names the cause. It doesn't need to. The contrast is enough. Human death is orderly here, with a gravedigger, named stones and a place set aside for it. The mountain's dead trees have no ritual and no names, and they sit in plain view of the tidy cemetery.
That is why the poem matters. It borrows the mood of Halloween, when we play at fearing death, and points it at a loss we would rather not face. Its central idea is that we know how to mourn one person but have no habit for mourning a hillside, and the speaker's guilt over "killing time" widens quietly into a larger guilt over what we let be killed. The poem never raises its voice or explains itself. It gives us a dog, a backhoe, a gravestone and a glance away, and it trusts us to feel the weight of that last glance.