Read against “Traveling Further” from the previous day, this poem shows what a revision looks like when the poet finds what the first attempt was reaching for.

The leaf is the addition that changes everything. “a single willow leaf / calmly swaying / lightly trembling / on a stream / of thought” gives the speaker a body and a scale. He is not travelling down the stream; he is what the stream carries, and he is small, and he trembles. Willow leaves are long and narrow and they fall while still green, which makes the choice specific rather than generic. The stream itself is no longer water at all — “a stream / of thought” — so the whole scene relocates inward without losing any of its physical detail.

“Momentary beginning” is the second addition, and it undercuts the origin before the poem has left it. Beginnings, in this version, do not last.

The central four lines are the finest writing: “eternal / in memory, / the cold current / still holds your warmth.” Two contradictions stacked. Eternity is downgraded to something that exists only in recollection, and then a cold current is said to hold warmth. Physically that’s false; a stream carries heat away. As a description of memory it is exactly right — the medium is cold and the thing preserved in it is not. The poem states this in eight words and refuses to elaborate.

Then the resolution of what the earlier draft left hanging. “Traveling Further” set down “never / forever” as two bare words with nothing attached. Here each one gets its clause: “never / close enough to keep / forever / deep enough to hold me.” The pairing turns out to have been a sentence all along. She is never close enough to be kept, and she is forever too deep to be escaped. Both halves are losses, and they are opposite losses.

The capitalization reverses from the earlier version, and the reversal is consistent enough to be deliberate. There, arrival was lowercase and departure capitalized. Here, “I Came” takes the capital and “as I leave” gives it up. Coming into the stream is the assertion; leaving happens quietly. “You,” standing alone on its own line with a comma, is the only other capital in the body, which places her at the same level as the arrival.

“The stream of becoming” arrives near the close and carries more philosophical weight than the catalog usually reaches for. A river you cannot step in twice is old territory, but pairing it with “muse of thought” rather than a muse of beauty or love makes the claim narrower and more interesting: she is not what he feels, she is how he thinks.

Twenty-six lines and almost no waste. The cold-current line alone would carry the poem, and the never-forever couplet arrives four stanzas later to carry it again. Both work by contradiction rather than by decoration, which is what separates this from the version written a day earlier.

The willow leaf is the structural fix. Giving the speaker an object to be, rather than a vantage to observe from, converts an abstract passage into something a reader can watch. Trembling is the word doing the most work there — a leaf on moving water does exactly that, and so does a man describing his own death and his own leaving.

Where it still shows strain is the second stanza. “to where we, combined / unfold to be” retains the earlier draft’s weakest instinct, reaching for an abstract verb at the poem’s midpoint. “Unfold” is better than the previous “evolve,” and it at least rhymes with a leaf, but the line remains the one place a reader has to slow down for the wrong reason. The comma placement in “we, combined” also reads as uncertain rather than considered.

Against “Traveling Further,” this is the finished poem. Publishing both would ask readers to admire a draft.