Heron and Heraclitus
1.
The body is never the same.
Cell content changes,
as does proportion and size,
maybe lean to fat.
As to that, a river is named
that may never flow.
A bed with no water at all
is still called a river;
and even the words that I write
on a flat white page
may be said by a critic to flow.
Context controls the meaning.
2.
I think of a heron that wades.
It creates new meaning,
setting up new patterns, new whorls.
Every step makes changes.
By contrast, this bench where I sit
is a concrete page.
What grows are the colored graffiti,
letters fat and cut into the rock
by depth are shaded.
Were this bench a river,
it would be so burdened with silt
it could never flow.
3.
The heron is calm and deliberate.
It opposes flow.
Leaning close like a near-sighted lover,
it hunts for meaning
in the form of quick silvery fish.
There's a hidden river
that the surface of this river contains
where the current changes
like opinions independent of fact.
There fish grow fat
sucking food from thick mud black as print
on a still wet page.
4.
I think of myself as a heron.
I stir this page,
using words like the feet of a heron
to direct the flow.
A river that had dwindled to slow
once again grows fat
with statement and contradiction.
There's no constant meaning.
If I don't say what it is I want said,
I can make changes.
Even so,
I make nothing that's new.
It's the same old river.
5.
The heron is lucky, spears a fish,
lifts a piece of river,
shakes its head and drips water like ink.
In the mirrored page
the border juts out like a shelf.
If internal changes
require alteration to rhyme, nothing's lost.
There is still the flow
that depends on the shape of the bank
to construct its meaning.
Down deep, where some fish are called cats,
channel cats grow fat.
6.
So I ask: What becomes of the heron?
What becomes of fat
when water dries up to a trickle?
It is still a river?
I admit we will still call it that
and will know the meaning,
but that doesn't speak to image
when the only page
states the record of drainage from Texas
and of flow the rate
that's sunk to a Mexican zero
due to manmade changes.
7.
My experience of the river is fat.
Each page is numbered,
but the river is not the same river.
What began as flow
turned to sand in its search for the meaning.
Now the wind makes changes.