Exchange

(For an Armenian poet in Yerevan) Here from this red maple New England fall where yellow and scarlet cover all the roads in painted leaves

I write to you in Yerevan, where gold shimmers on streets so old the trees are shaped by stone house eaves.

We exchange poems, yours in my mother tongue for me to translate and distribute among your scattered brothers overseas

and mine from English back into the air they were meant to breathe. We exchange autumns as if we pressed and mailed the leaves.