Fall stumbles onto the scene, soft & slow,
splattering crimson-yellow splotches on the trees.

Yesterday I watched the ginkgo leaves falling,
like golden rain spilled onto a yellow blanket.

I stepped on the fruit, downtrodden
by aimless feet. Disturbed the flies feeding
on the rounding carcasses, the rotting remnants

of a beautiful war. In the summer, the corpse flower
bloomed for the first time in eight years,

her fragrance of fish and decayed flesh calling
dissident insects to her. I watched her through

a glass screen; the greenhouse humming
with Venus flytraps and pitcher plants,
all of them outdone, outshone, by the giant,

the once-in-a-decade bloomer. She unfurled,
green to pink to purple in a span of days,

then crumpled like dyed paper back to slumber.
This last, lonely mercy, now: this standing underneath

the yellowing, this sighing of the lonely ginkgo tree.
If shedding means the rest will follow—

then, could I learn from the spectacle of this golden haze?
In the years following could I claim rest,

claim an ending? Hold that final, falling syllable
of this languid autumn tree, swept with the length

of lingering days,
  & go.