The friends have gone home far up the valley <br />of that river into whose estuary <br />the man from England sailed in his own age <br />in time to catch sight of the late forests <br />furring in black the remotest edges <br />of the majestic water always it <br />appeared to me that he arrived just as <br />an evening was beginning and toward the end <br />of summer when the converging surface <br />lay as a single vast mirror gazing <br />upward into the pearl light that was <br />already stained with the first saffron <br />of sunset on which the high wavering trails <br />of migrant birds flowed southward as though there were <br />no end to them the wind had dropped and the tide <br />and the current for a moment seemed to hang <br />still in balance and the creaking and knocking <br />of wood stopped all at once and the known voices <br />died away and the smells and rocking <br />and starvation of the voyage had become <br />a sleep behind them as they lay becalmed <br />on the reflection of their Half Moon <br />while the sky blazed and then the tide lifted them <br />up the dark passage they had no name for<br /><br />William Stanley Merwin<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/another-river/
