A month ago was summer—now here we are
in the raunchy, roseate October sun
carving spooky faces in a pumpkin.
My daughter scoops a handful of the seeds
and weaves the stringy meat between her thumbs
pretending she’s a zombie, drunk on brains.
I laugh. She screams. Then wipes them on her jeans.
There is no trick-or-treating where we live
so we just populate the house with pumpkins,
the cobwebs on our ceilings real enough
we don’t need to invest in the fake stuff.

I miss the glimmering New England trees
radiating bloody palettes of red
splotching the landscape like a painted bed.
I’ve seen it happen in old calendars
and once or twice for real: one autumn day
some friends and I rented a hatchback
and drove up from New York to a state park
in the Hudson Valley—earnest, purposeful—
to see the glory of the altered leaves.
The four of us, clodhopping over boulders
in city clothes! We stopped on a country road
for apple cider, ecstatic as toddlers,
the hot perfume of clove and cinnamon
shocking our senses out of the humdrum.

I feel that energy again today
a surplus of oxygen to the brain
which makes us giddy, gives us rabbit feet,
steadies the staggering pulse, ignites the blood.
My daughter, too, is carving memories
into her hippocampus, so future-she
can rediscover them when apple-ripe.
They’ll give me back to her when I am gone 
(nature’s only form of restitution)
as she regales her children with the time
their grandfather sang “Halloween Parade”
beneath the turning chestnuts, pocket-knife
in hand, and taught her how to pierce the taut
gold-orange flesh with its half-rusted blade.