Fluid daylight

Dawn returns blue foliage

to the riverbank, rippling leaves with light.

Think how the changeling seasons

have gone quick

like that...

trees redden

and brown, and you want to say

wait; for moments they empty,

crack the sky, then an evening at dinner

you glance out again at their fingertip

greens....

Faint piccolo voices

of children back at play outdoors

meander between your thoughts,

and for an impulse you think

they are your own and look up

though the yard is empty.

You think of long-lived summers

of your school days, fat lives of sparrows

sputtering through winters that stretched

like drifts; how you lived each season's separate

life and between was such

a distance...

and now this surge

into another spring of Indian summer

about to glaze with autumn's frost,

the lake's dream of ice already rising.