Here I am saying “The leaves are falling”
— one of those choruses
that vie with interminable verses
to mock hoarders.
Yeah, we get
that a palette of winds
is a pretty thing:
one blurs the anther, another
the river splurging on riprap,
expunging
phosphates,
out of the temperature
differential building
sculptural fogs
that promenade
between shores a glacier
wedged ajar, a fjord.
Whatever gives the river
its seriousness reverses
in the light
of those clouds moving
as if absorbing
their pomp in advance of it —
characters
which untied the painter
and took the sculls again.