Tributary

You want the past to end already.
But how do you expect to shake it?
The fog tonight looks dark, feels deadly.
Tomorrow, too: a tangled thicket
impervious to your machete.

How can you know what map to draw
unless you float above the earth?
How can you know, mid-Amazon,
what lies ahead? Yet you set forth,
your blindness pure, your end foregone.

You only know the path you’ve known:
Falls, rapids, doldrums, dysentery;
and years of looking back for one
who left you for a tributary
so slim, so quickly overgrown,
she had to make the trip alone.