What the River Keeps

A river is the opposite of a hoard. It holds everything by letting it go —

the cattle’s breath, the alder’s shadow, the ring you dropped in nineteen ninety-four,

your face at seven, leaning out too far, your father’s arm across you like a gate.

Nothing is stored and nothing is lost. The water that carried you is in Kerry now,

or Newfoundland, or falling as rain on somebody’s washing in another county,

and still the river is where you left it, saying the one long sentence it has always said,

which is not goodbye and is not stay, but something between, that we have no word for.