Most men wouldn’t be caught dead in makeup—then they are, laid cold in a coffin for final display.
A spruce wears lights and stars only in the short frantic weeks between the lot and the curb.
Just one more tree until sacralized by impulse hardened bow saw teeth and icons of family and rituals passed and passing.
Baptized to a calling echoed in the myths of trees but hardly worthy a seven-year sapling otherwise destined (in some decades) to be a light pole or flare of fire;
Maybe a 2x4 that nobly holds a wall of the family home where a distant cousin or great-grandchild one day stands in temporary juvenile honor.
Another, spared enough days and a straight place to grow, could be a fine violin and make rosin for the bow.
Each day for years you dress yourself until one day someone picks out your last suit, like your first Christmas or Easter.
But in your last suit you won’t squirm against the too-tight collar or fret about the press of the pleats and color of the tie.
Until then will you struggle and fight, or gradually—gracefully, gratefully— drop needles on the carpet until someone says, “It’s time.”