What Any Lover Learns

Water is heavy silver over stone.
Water is heavy silver over stone's
Refusal. It does not fall. It fills. It flows
Every crevice, every fault of the stone,
Every hollow. River does not run.
River presses its heavy silver self
Down into stone and stone refuses.

                                         What runs,
Swirling and leaping into sun, is stone's
Refusal of the river, not the river.

Archibald MacLeish
Collected Poems 1917 - 1952