The river ran for thirty years without a single hesitation,
cutting through the stone of the ordinary in its patient excavation
of a channel through the territory of the life he thought he’d live —
the river didn’t ask for much and the river had to give.
It carved the canyon of his younger years, it bent and turned and found
the lowest path through everything that stood above the ground
of what was possible — the river found the way through —
back when the river had a somewhere it was heading to.
The current used to have an urgency that kept the water moving —
the gradient of wanting and the slope that kept improving
the velocity of forward, the white water of the need —
now the river is a delta moving slowly to the creed
of the flatland, where the water spreads into the shallow and the wide,
and loses the velocity that the gradient provided —
the river that stops caring in a delta slows to still,
and the still is not unpleasant in the way the still can fill.
The canyon is still there — the evidence of thirty years of going —
the walls cut deep and smooth from all the years of flowing —
a man can walk the canyon and trace the river’s history in the stone,
see where it ran fast and where it slowed and turned and where it found the bone.
But the river is no longer there with the urgency that cut it —
the river in the canyon now moves slower, can’t rebut it —
and the canyon is a record of a man who used to run
at the speed of thirty years of wanting, and is now mostly done.
The fishing in the slow river is actually better —
the fish have time to consider and the water has the letter
of the law on their side — the slow river and the fishing man
in the boat without the paddle, moving in the plan
of the current’s lazy choosing through the shallow afternoon —
and the man in the slow river isn’t asking for it soon,
whatever it is that used to live upstream in the fast —
the slow river and the fishing man have found their steadfast.
The delta’s wide and warm in the late-afternoon of the life,
the river has no rapids and the man has no more fight —
the water moves because water moves, because that’s what water does —
the river that stopped caring is the river that it was,
just the later portrait, wider, slower, further from the source —
the river that stopped caring has completed its required course —
and the delta is the destination the river didn’t know it had —
and the river that stopped caring doesn’t call the delta sad.