I have to write this quickly
before the flare dies out
and day brings back my night.
A burning autumnal light
backlit by a harvest sun.
This melancholic flourish
before the fall of garden gloves.
I wonder more and more
about the second life of plants
overgrowing toward their end.
I wonder about the stillness
where hardly a leaf is disturbed
from where it sometime fell.
The death flare rises up
in me like earth’s fire.
It is my one moment of lucidity
before the poem dies out.