Someone started a fire in my backyard.  It wasn’t obvious at first.  It smoldered out of sight among the roots.  It burned away the flowers’ vitality.  It left in its wake the brittle brown shadows of plants.  It climbed slowly, concealed by the vegetation it consumed.  There was never anything I could do, and by the time I realized what was happening the fire had reached the lower branches of the trees.  No longer hiding, the flames burst forth with wild confidence, proclaiming their existence in an explosion of color that bloomed through the leaves: blood new from the flesh; a just ripened apple suspended from a branch; cheeks scratched by wind chill; alpenglow on a distant peak; faded lust; a fox slipping away in the mist; rust clinging to a tractor shackled by weeds; the light from a sodium street lamp; that faded photo from the Seventies; the glow from Hell; a pumpkin on the vine; an orange under the grocery store’s fluorescent lights; the slanted rays of summer’s late afternoons; mustard oozing from a sandwich; a round straw bale at sunset; corn peeking through the husk; shades of jaundiced skin; limestone smoothed by time; a mushroom in the forest; barnwood weathered for decades; a river opaque with silt; a deer glimpsed through the trees; a potato ripped from the earth; mud between your fingers; an apple rotting beneath a tree; blood three days dry.  When the blaze was so fierce your eyes watered, when the flames had left nothing untouched, the fire finally collapsed in on itself, and its remains floated to the ground – some embers, smoldering weakly in the memory of their past glory; some ashes, mere suggestions of what they’d once been.  The trees were denuded, and they clawed at the sky in agony.  That night a cold gray hand pulled a white sheet of snow over the fire’s dead coals, and I paid my last respects to autumn’s memory.