THE RIVER

 The river is within us, the sea is all about us.

Let there be continuous commerce within my soul;
Let this swirling stream ever bear the trudge
Of black barges, moving slowly, deep with coal,
Through a tired city. Though in the long night
Those solid vessels seem no more than shadows
On a dark water, glinting in the light
Of distant streetlamps, all that then goes
Between these banks, up or down stream,
Is traffic essential to the sleeping land,
Movement in the darkness behind the dream,
Fuel and food moving quietly past the strand.
At night too, there is the downward drift of things
Released from the river’s endless commerce,
The muddy, time-toiling river which brings
Life to those who wish for time’s reverse:
Outward flow the timbers of sunken boat,
Old anchors shift in the silting sand,
Broken buoys drift with rotten ropes
And all pass out from reach of land.
So in the pervading night, the river bears away
Our refuse, bears away the daily hopes
Of those who fear the darkness behind the day,
And all temporal ties, like loosened ropes,
Fall from their moorings, and the familiar, the known,
Drifts down to the waiting sea, which devours
All that seemed permanent, but was on loan
For a few sun-bright, wind-washed hours.

That tackle, torn from a purpose now past,
No longer strives upstream, but can accept
The downward flow of time and its last
Journey into an empty sea, which will select
Some of time’s deposits, and smooth and shape them
Beyond simple recognition of their past purpose,
(As discarded theatre props can never again
Be ordinary objects, but retain a curious
Impression of their function on the stage
As though they had assimilated the speeches
And now hold that play’s tenderness or rage).
So the boards and buoys resting on the beaches,
Disgorged by the sea, and dried by the sun,
Wait here for their first proper use,
As if for this they had long ago begun.
Thus seems what time’s returning refuse,
Battered buoys, driftwood tagged with tar,
Might now be used to mark a lobster pot,
Or as fuel for a quickly burning beach fire,
Flaming with a mystery as brief as it is hot.

Do not let our possible parting overwhelm
My soul; though the water of streams and pools
This wandering river has only one realm,
One certain course which, long decided, rules
Its slow direction towards the open sea.
Do not let distress damn and backward beat
These powerful waters, which no more free
To flow forward must then flood the street
And the green fields above the gloomy town:
Water driven across land it used to drain
In which all varieties of life must drown
Covered in the silent but continual pain
Of a discovered time that could not flow away.
Let there be continuous commerce within my soul;
In this long darkness let barges bring in food
And fuel, shadows moving to an unknown goal,
Another time and place, whose unknown good
Is to enable the discovery on a distant beach
Of these fragments of time, a broken heat
So surprising the stranger as to let him reach
A vision of day in the far city street.
For the river now is dark, and the darkness
That shimmers on the surface will always be
The darkness in which we drown, and is
The darkness in which the day drifts out to sea.