POETRY

Same River Twice

A bad call, Heraclitus. Men are always

Stepping twice into the same river:

The river of our feelings, which will never

Much change, though we endeavour all our days

To tame them, and indeed unless behaviour

Improves on instinct we are lost, and those

We love will suffer for our naturalness –

A virtue only when it does not close

The pathway to a cure for the distress

Engendered by our energies. The aim,

Or at any rate the outcome, has to be

Knowledge of self. Without that, nemesis

Waits in the water, every time the twin

Of how it looked the last time we stepped in.

Surely you see now that you gave your name

To the easy option. Nobody disagrees

About the infinitely shifting texture

Of the world. A malefactor loves the haze

Of boiling chance that blurs the total picture,

The fog you stand in up to your stiff knees,

Looking so wise, as if you’d solved the structure

Of all causality, when you, in fact,

Left out the thing we needed most to know –

That our character will leave us free to act

In contradiction to its steady flow

Only through our regretting that the river,

Though never still, is still the same as ever.

No man steps out of it, not even once.

-- Standpoint, September 2010