Inexorable Flow

Bonnie Manion

All day long we flow companionably beside each other,

Colorado River bounding and bubbling toward the West,

Amtrak’s silver California Zephyr snaking Eastward. 

We roll as steadily on our steel rails set at a 4% grade

as the great river tumbling over and upon itself.

 

Brown and swift, the Colorado digs at and carries away

these mountains, as it has for more than a million years. 

Dense with a swirling load of silt on its way to an ocean, 

the great river drills deepening canyons on the same

free-falling thousand-mile journey as ever.

 

Passing through dozens of valley-long reservoirs, vain

attempts by man to constrain, tame its essence, the surge

presses to an ageless path that neither colliding continents

nor flowing volcanoes, over eons, could ever breach

 

as it reaches for the faraway beckoning sea.