All rivers end somewhere.
Merging with others,
they meander, rush forward,
to empty themselves like time
or a man making love.
Or they just stop,
perhaps going underground,
fluvius interruptus.
Navigating all this
on the long journey
in a canoe turns tricky.
Portage requires reassessing
what’s important enough
to risk the residual pain
of carrying across long distances,
and what can be left behind:
Pictures of the ancestral dead,
their journals that list
when they saw what movie
and how much it cost,
vacation brochures with scribbled dates,
greeting cards with glimpses
of personalities now submerged in time.
Are these important enough to move?
Should we lay such things
as a child’s report card
with all A’s and a B in handwriting,
proving that she was destined
to be a doctor, into a recycling bin
or leave it behind for her to find?
Will she even traverse this same river
or is she following her own?
If we put it in a box for her,
will the wind pick it up
to carry it to her when she is lazing
upon some other riverbank,
like where we stand now at this bend,
to encourage her forward
or simply overwhelm her
with residual ancestral hopes?
What to carry forward?
And what to leave behind
on this portage
to our new river’s edge?
It would be easier not to pause
and take existential stock.
But we must, so we patiently unload—
sort and cry, remember and decide.
These boxes of memories
might sink our canoe going forth,
but neither can we afford to cut off
a limb of who we are,
which will do us no good.
We want to be as whole as possible
to navigate the next great unknown,
and we’ll need our past hard-won knowledge.
So what to carry,
what to give away?
What to leave as markers
for the next generation?
What to bury so that it ends
like some lost river?
And what to destroy so that the narrative
can meander on with meaning?