Uncertainty

We are opening books and checking the verses
terrified they have changed;
and change they have,
the leaves have turned yellow and
fallen,
and there is beauty in the bare branches,
unfrozen from thought-
the words are alive in this way,
and in ways impossible to memorize.
They have grown without us and
we have grown, too,
and all is different and all is
sure, for a moment,
until we close the books and tuck them away,
and again, again,
they remain in memory.