On Returning from Six Weeks Abroad

It is being born into a dream
who is strangely familiar.
It is forgetting and relearning
which key is the laundry room,
admitting you have no longer any use
for the skeletal subway map in your pocket
that held fast for so long the flesh of life
at one past corner in our flooding pool of time.
And you can't quite grasp the order of things
so your actions take on an air of superfluity,
an extra degree of difference, like ordering
another espresso just for the accompanying cookie
that they don't even have here.
In some cases, this sense of semi-permanence
may seep out in circles as ink in water
'til November days feel less autumnal and more like
Fall, as though the whole world was,
a playground at dusk,
emptying of its children.
But of course it is always
summer somewhere, though to hold this
in the mind's anxious eye
is like trying to track the flight of a single bird
the whole afternoon, which will render refulgent
the shadow-angle season change endlessly
conquering territory to frost,
retreating beneath May's bloom of birds.
It is choosing which old pain to forget
and which to wear like a soldier,
medals shining sun
resplendent scars
splaying soul
across Horizons
you're yet to see
but will