Twenty-eight lines, most of them two or three words, and the poem’s whole method is to keep the reader moving at the pace of the current it describes. Almost nothing here is stated. The verbs do the arguing.

Water arrives in three forms across the poem, and the progression matters. First “a bubbling stream,” which is ordinary and physical. Then “the stream whispers / dreams,” where the water acquires speech. Finally “my / wishing stream,” where the possessive claims it and “wishing” converts it into something closer to a well than a river. A stream you travel down becomes a stream you wish into. That drift from motion to intention happens without a single line of explanation.

The poem’s oddest and best moment is two words on two lines: “never / forever.” No punctuation, no syntax connecting them to what precedes or follows. Read one way they are opposites set adrift. Read another they modify the same thing — she will never leave, and she will remain forever — which makes them a single idea split across a line break. David has used this kind of orphaned pairing before, but rarely with terms that contradict each other so cleanly. The ambiguity feels earned rather than accidental, because the whole poem is about a current that carries things past.

“As I leave” is the hinge, and it is placed almost exactly at the midpoint. Everything before it moves toward union: from beginning, down, to where we, unified, evolve to be eternal. Everything after it describes what stays behind. The speaker gets eternity and then departs it, which is a stranger sequence than it first appears.

The lowercase opening “i came” and the capital “As I leave” reverse the usual weighting. The arrival is small. The departure is the one that gets a capital letter.

The final word does the most work. “tonight—” arrives after eternal, forever, and dream, and it contracts the entire cosmic frame to a single evening. Then a dash, and nothing. The poem stops mid-gesture rather than concluding, which is the correct ending for a piece about a current that keeps going after you get out of it.

Quiet and well made. The poem trusts its central image to carry the whole argument and never breaks to explain itself, which is discipline the catalog doesn’t always show. The three-stage transformation of the stream is the technical achievement, and it works precisely because a reader absorbs it without noticing the mechanism.

“Never / forever” is the line that will divide readers. It can be read as deliberate ambiguity or as two words that happened to rhyme, and the poem gives no evidence either way. My reading is that it earns its place, because the surrounding lines are equally stripped and the poem is clearly working in a register where a reader is expected to supply connective tissue. A more suspicious reader would call it convenient.

The weakness is in the middle. “to where / we, / unified, / evolve to be // eternal” is the one passage that reaches for large abstract words, and it reaches for four of them in a row. Unified, evolve, eternal — none of them has the physical specificity of the water imagery on either side, and the poem’s spell breaks slightly while they pass. Everything else here is concrete or deliberately bare. That stanza is neither.