same river thrice with narrative for those in need

a man walked sideways for fifteen days it was a discipline
taught to him by a guru as an act intended to bring about
awakening of a sideways sort but after these fifteen days
the man felt neglectful of the other direction and side
and felt that he must now attend to that
but in these opposing fifteen days he felt
that he was somehow revisiting earlier work
and indeed did he arrive after much thought and travail
at that place where the guru still stood urging him on towards
one side or the other it was somehow difficult now
to identify sides and the man decided not sidewalks
but rivers might be his thing and therefore left for a place
where there were known to be such rivers even in their sidedness
and downward determining and there eventually he arrived
although his motion had been still a little sideward
as of a river or wind although either might be disputed
and there there he sat and did not think any longer
of aught but rivers and their directionlessness
and each night there by the river was as though
a hurricane and a vast mouth and a red light that gleamed
and in all he was happy with it and felt it to be
a kind of love of which he had not known
and one night he slipped softly into the river
with pockets filled with stones and was borne away
in some direction that seemed at once this way and that
so now the direction seemed not to matter
and he slept softly there being carried down or up
to the new and farther place of ending and beginning
like some message in a bottle that could not be salvaged
until the very end and the sediment itself would be raised
now compacted and formed into rock that towered like time


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