The trees are cracks in the blue sky

as the sun descends—baleful eye

that sets alight its dusky wake

as a witch fettered to a stake.

Smoking moon low above the trees,

orange glow, cold air, and no breeze.

She walks—slow-tread—from house to house,

her footfall quiet as a mouse,

her black hair spilling to her hips,

nude but for the ash on her lips,

as she threads the street and lampposts

all aglow like luminous ghosts.

The cars are still, the windows dark,

houses dead, the dogs do not bark,

and owls watch her, their heads askew,

eyes aflame with the twilight view

as the moon becomes orange flame,

embers flaring, woman the same,

but she walks on, pale flesh like wax

melting off her bones, wet and lax,

dripping along Salem sidewalks

like bright-burning candle stalks—

on she walks, slow, and the moon glows

with the fire the other one knows

as they both burn clean to white bone,

meeting down the street, leaf-strewn

with the sloughing leper’s season

of Autumn’s withering treason.

Bone to bone beneath umbrous hoods,

woman and moon meet in the woods,

bearing each a paternal gaze

to its end, its requiem phase,

dead themselves, and so free at last

from will o’ the wisps of the past.

They kiss the other a good night,

snuffing, at last, that baleful light.