Going
Consider the pinecone she tosses to the creek as we stand in the late Pleistocene pathway. Where will it go, she asks, seeing it move with the flow as you try to explain the water to a child—or is it the ripples— drawing down to the pond, a mere detour before escaping port-side where the carp gather & dropping again to the persistent creek, eastbound to the Wallkill & through the glacial past that runs north over cataracts & driftwood, hauling whole trees lightly lifted & dropped by the rhythm of the rains, another pause at Sturgeon Pool then falling again, more fully in spring, out to the farthest stem that is not the farthest after all as it mingles with the end of the Roundout flow that is not an end but a beginning that spreads, alluvial, a flattened eddy, lost but not lost in the Hudson’s sea bound run. And the ocean? What then? This chat is the sounded breath she’ll remember, exhausting itself toward absence, an absence as appearance, the particular that will no longer be particular, the distinct flow suddenly indistinct, the one that is before and after, the one that is here in the breath drawn, & now let go. Kevin Swanwick, March, 2026