Holiday’s End

[From an image by Titus Tscharntke.]

Thanks have been given, the turkey consumed. Dwindling days flash by stroboscopically. Trees are bare, but the broken branches piled in the street hold their leaves, remains of the great Halloween blizzard. They shattered loudly, like breaking bones, as they fell. Now they quietly release the pungency of decay. Vegetative rot, the evolutionary ancestor of fleshly decay, rises to the nose. The sharp tang of oak resin sublimates from the ripped wounds. The waxing crescent moon dims into the mist.