Reflections on a River

But this, though lost to the sight,
was retained in the memory
– St. Augustine, The Confessions

I headed down that path as if would lead me back,
Having half a notion mere motion, only a single visit,
Could open me, or my memory, to vistas of the past
That had (but in fact?) passed so fast under some bridge.
I had come back one afternoon to my old hometown
And wandered around an hour or two, till soon I stood
Looking down at my old all-red brick school’s brook
That, after a passage of ages, seemed brown compared
To what it had been when seen by me at five or at ten,
Attention then tending to clear all things I turned it on…
And while I’m going on five times ten I can remember it then,
When, being younger, it used to run along with no more thought
Where it was going than where it had come from, a form caught up
In its current alone, one with its going-along-in-song (but all this,
I suppose, is only the reflection of one grown lonely and older).

I had headed down the path that opened me up to pastures of the Past,
Found out how a place may be an area on Earth or an aura in our heart,
Either or both (but discovered that to separate one form from the other
Is about as hard as to cut out and put back together slivers of river),
Each acre of terrain- plain, hill, valley or ravine- buried in dry folds
Of my brain till yesterday’s rain falls again and all floods to Mind.
I had come at the end- so it soon proved- of a long, dry season,
When no rain had fallen for more than a month, and every bed
Where water had its course run, from source to end, was a mouth
Ready to drink deep and long, speak its peace, pour forth its song.
Lost in my thoughts, I came to find this place, so distant in Space
And Time, while not the same as me was in me as mine; that Time
Is tied to tide in the wide waters of our Minds, retreating and returning,
Moving us with a motion as Moon oceans; that what eludes us resumes,
And that our partings are but the preludes to reunions, at one remove.

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