Where the Rivers Part

From veins of earth where no sun falls,
where stone has never learned a name,
two waters rose without a word
and bore the selfsame ancient flame.
One tasted iron, one tasted snow,
yet both remembered the same dark —
the slow cathedral of the deep,
the first and consecrated arc.
 
The canyon dressed itself in echoes.
The current learned a second tongue.
What moved between was not a question —
it was an answer, never sung.
We spoke in rapids, breathed in rain,
one throat of stone, one hymn, one prayer.
O ancient water, was it written
upon the bedrock long before —
that what converges must divide,
that every confluence has a shore?
 
Then came the lowland, wide and gentle,
with room enough for soil to grow.
No hand was raised, no wall descended —
the earth itself said: let me go.
The land had spoken soft between us,
and the river answered the air.
What once was one became a country
too wide for any bridge to bear.
 
Beneath the salt of separate oceans,
beneath the weight of unnamed tides,
there lives a memory without a keeper —
a single drop that never dries.
It does not call. It does not wander.
It holds no grief. It speaks no vow.
It only knows what water knows:
that once was once — and once is now.
 
O ancient water — it was written
upon the bedrock long before:
the river knows no ending,
only doors — and doors — and doors.
 
— Where the Rivers Part

谨此纪念我的过去