River-born fugitives, red muscled under sheathing silver,
Alive with lights of ocean's changing colours,
The range of deeps and distances through wild salt years
Has gathered the seas's plenty into your perfection.
Fullness is the long return from dark depths
Rendering toll of itself to the searching nets
Surging on to strife on brilliant gravel shallows
That opened long ago behind the failing ice.
In violence over the gravel, under the blaze of fall
Fullness spends itself, thrusting forth new life
To nurse in the stream's flow. The old life,
Used utterly, yields itself among th river rocks of home.
