Where the River Outlasts Us
There are places where beauty does not console. It only continues.
A cliff. A river. Evening moving over stone and water. The world remains exact, luminous, indifferent — and because it remains, the absence deepens. Something magnificent has withdrawn before the speaker arrived. The view is still there. The door is not.
From Where the River Outlasts Us:
You stand where the cliff ends.
Not falling.
Worse.
Held.
Below you, the river keeps
its one long sentence moving
through stone, reed, evening,water saying nothing
and never finished.
The poem holds that impossible tension: to be alive before a beauty that outlasts us, and to know that whatever once filled the world with myth, presence, or promise has already passed beyond reach. Nothing resolves. The river goes on. Evening continues. The wound is not that beauty vanishes, but that beauty remains after everything it seemed to promise has withdrawn.
Continue reading Where the River Outlasts Us in The Vow on Substack.
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If this piece found something in you, you may wish to continue the journey elsewhere.
On The Lantern Chronicles, I gather writings from Angkor, myth and legend, contemplative essays, and poetry — works shaped by silence, beauty, wonder, memory, and the deeper questions that follow us through the world.
It is a place for stone and story, reflection and vow, shadow and revelation.
You would be most welcome there.