Thursday Poem - Looking for Gold

A flavor like wild honey begins

when you cross the river. On a sandbar

sunlight stretches out its limbs, or is it

a sycamore, so brazen, so clean and so bold?

You forget about gold. You stare—and a flavor

is rising all the time from the trees.

Back from the river, over by a thick

forest, you feel the tide of wild honey

flooding your plans, flooding the hours

till they waver forward looking back. They can’t

return; that river divides more than

two sides of your life. The only way

is farther, breathing that country, becoming

wise in its flavor, a native of the sun

William Stafford

from The Way it Is: New and Selected Poems