Poem For The Unrelenting Past

A river
has banks that close it in,

canyons along its length perhaps,
coves, eddies, sandbars, drowned trees.

It can be marked on a map.
It can be named.  It can be dammed,

at which point the old path
is hidden but at low times

it may be seen, mourned,
recalled.

But mostly, it flows. Swiftly now, slowly now, it flows.
You may swim in it again and again,

but a river is never
the same place twice.  A trip upstream

sees what is, not what was, and never
what could have been.  All you can ever do

is swim in the river
now.