What Remains of the River

You ask when the river first
knew of the sea —
not at the end, where it gave itself away,
but high up, when it was barely
a glistening in the moss,
a trembling under stones.

It knew already there.
Not in words. Words come later,
if at all. It knew
the way the marble knows the figure
sleeping inside it —
without seeing, without proof,
only by the weight of what is asked.

And the man in the overalls,
sitting in the yard, his mind
loosening like a knot
worked too long by patient fingers —
he knew too. He had always known.

The fish given away,
the grandchildren who climbed close
to kiss his cheek, and the gruffness
he wore like a thin coat
over the pleasure of being reached —
each of these a small unmaking,
a stone lifted from the bank
so the water could pass.

You think the arrow sharpens
near the end. I tell you:
the end was never the point.
The point was the turning,
and the turning began
the moment you were poured
out of the mountain.

Some are poured for a long descent.
Some for a short one.
The sea does not measure them.
The sea only receives.

And what you feel today —
this thinness, this listening —
is not a wound. It is the river
hearing itself
for the first time
as water,
and in the water,
already, the slow salt,
the dark weight,
the echo of the ocean
it has not yet seen
but has always
carried.