On Nature (the river fragment)

“Feet in the swing over the creek I was too scared to jump in”

Community readers reach for the river that cannot be stepped into twice to describe the creek, and the image earns the reference even though both readers who offered it misattributed the idea. Of everything in the remembered scene - the trees, the swing, the state below - the creek is the one element that is definitionally not there any more, and it is the one thing the child refuses to enter. The poem places the refusal at the exact point where return becomes impossible, which is why "I was too scared to jump in" carries more weight than a child's ordinary caution. Most listeners meet the thought through Stephen Schwartz's lyric for Pocahontas, "you can't step in the same river twice, the water's always changing, always flowing", which is where one of the readings came from.