The River Holds

Silt settles in the quiet bends where light fragments like amber glass— each granule a story the current won't carry further.

My hands remember the cold, how it burned before numbness, how the riverbed spoke in ancient syllables only my feet could read.

The willows lean in, their fingers trailing across surfaces they've forgotten, teaching the water old songs it will sing to the next uncertain body.

Time moves here like sediment, visible in the layered banks, each flood a calendar the earth keeps without asking permission to remember.

I stand at the threshold where fresh becomes salt, where rivers lose their names and the ocean claims another voice, and I understand: everything dissolves, everything returns.