A river works hard to return to the ocean.
Eroding its own bed, dividing, cutting,
discerning its way, deep, into the parent rock.

How deep must it go into the ocean
before the river no longer remains?
Where does river become ocean?

In the fathoms of muddy water,
where it's almost turned back.
Where the visible is amended by the invisible.
The river's movement is its vanishing -
and it becomes the insistent ocean,

folding into the pulse of the tide,
returning, to pull forever on a tragic shore,
where nothing remains whole.

**********

"How far is true enough? How far into the earth
can vision go and still be love?" The Age of Reason, Jorie Graham