If there is a man white as marble

Sits in a wood, in the greenest part,

Brooding sounds of the images of death,

So there is a man in black space

Sits in nothing that we know,

Brooding sounds of river noises;

And these images, these reverberations,

And others, make certain how being

Includes death and the imagination.

The marble man remains himself in space.

The man in the black wood descends unchanged.

It is certain that the river

Is not Swatara. The swarthy water

That flows round the earth and through the skies,

Twisting among the universal spaces,

Is not Swatara. It is being.

That is the flock-flecked river, the water,

The blown sheen—or is it air?

How, then, is metaphor degeneration,

When Swatara becomes this undulant river

And the river becomes the landless, waterless ocean?

Here the black violets grow down to its banks

And the memorial mosses hang their green

Upon it, as it flows ahead.