Returns

It's sad to come back, because everything changes.
Look at the sky –- the sky is like a river,
And the clouds are rusted sediment, sentiments
Changing. Similar faces, the clouds -–
It's sad to see them change
And stay the same. It reminds me of time,
Watching them, and I'm not even here
To see them. A ring of fog becomes a whale,
Whales migrate into dolphins, dolphins pass
Into slivers of glass, sun-stained, sea-stained,
The crimson color of leaves in grass. Figments or landscapes:
Autumn canyons, sandwich shops
In the winter, S.U.V.'s –-
All of these must change. Maybe it's hard to see
At first, like flakes of rust, crumbs and dust, or a fresh layer
Of lusty leaves, but the landscape changes
Only to become more like itself; only
We are different, we must change.