All travel is like fiction,

visiting foreign lands, antique and new,

that the inhabitants call real.

And always when one at last perceives this,

seeing the hum-drum beneath the illusion,

one must leave, There is no point

in being caught in other people's fictions.

 

After awhile, of course, the world runs out of novelties

with which to amuse us.

We must fall back on the truth

that all things are only new and strange

because they are ephemeral.

 

-- Louis Dudek

 

(Atlantis, 1967)