To Reach the End Unharmed

The allure of the source, of origin,
Is what motivates us to reach the end.

It’s almost surprising how little used
That strangeness has been, the allegory

That to search out the river’s beginning
We have to claw our way up to its end.

What the future and death have in common,
Besides the fact that no one’s been in them,

Is that they both lie at the beginning,
And it takes great effort to get near them.

No one can paddle and portage, can climb
All the way to an origin, without

Earnestly trying to get to the end,
Which is how I take the tragic Greeks’ claims,

Their grim jokes about no one getting through
Life unharmed, trouble to come as trouble

Now and has been—no one gets out alive.
It’s not getting out I worry about,

And it’s not coming back downstream again.
What’s on my little mind as I push on

Past sages frozen crosswise to the flow
To the bemusement of the ferryman,

In this need to go, in the urge to know,
Is the notion of any beginning,

The point beyond which one can find nothing
More flowing, having arrived at the end.