Stream of Change
I think I’m changing,
in order to see it you need to be in front of me and behind me and on both sides all at once.
Change is continuous, according to Heraclitus, moving in its own current,
not spilling or overflowing,
as if it is just the right amount.
Everything streams is the way the Cratylus describes it.
The current leaves while the stream stays, peeling off what it’s attached to,
sometimes I think there isn’t much difference, but I’m really thinking it doesn’t make much difference.
Heraclitus believed you are never going to be the same person you are now because that person no longer exists.
Because that person is streaming.
Streams have options, deepening or broadening,
channeling one way or the other.
The current has a craving but not the stream.
Heraclitus’s ideas survive only in a few fragments in the works of others.
I think change often starts inside and moves outside, like a form of abandonment,
apart from that I don’t have any plans.
There is a sense in which Heraclitus’s concept of continuous change is a permanent marker erasing itself.
As when something is misplaced,
not lost but in the wrong place, where nobody thinks to look.
in order to see it you need to be in front of me and behind me and on both sides all at once.
Change is continuous, according to Heraclitus, moving in its own current,
not spilling or overflowing,
as if it is just the right amount.
Everything streams is the way the Cratylus describes it.
The current leaves while the stream stays, peeling off what it’s attached to,
sometimes I think there isn’t much difference, but I’m really thinking it doesn’t make much difference.
Heraclitus believed you are never going to be the same person you are now because that person no longer exists.
Because that person is streaming.
Streams have options, deepening or broadening,
channeling one way or the other.
The current has a craving but not the stream.
Heraclitus’s ideas survive only in a few fragments in the works of others.
I think change often starts inside and moves outside, like a form of abandonment,
apart from that I don’t have any plans.
There is a sense in which Heraclitus’s concept of continuous change is a permanent marker erasing itself.
As when something is misplaced,
not lost but in the wrong place, where nobody thinks to look.
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Barbara Bosworth. Untitled, 2014. From the series Summer Days: The Water’s Edge. Courtesy of the artist.
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Peter Leight lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. He has previously published poems in Paris Review, AGNI, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Matter, and other magazines.
Barbara Bosworth is a photographer whose large-format images explore both overt and subtle relationships between humans and the rest of the natural world. Whether chronicling the efforts of hunters or bird banders, or evoking the seasonal changes that transform mountains and meadows, Bosworth’s caring attention to the world around her results in images that similarly inspire viewers to look closely. Bosworth’s work has been widely exhibited, notably in recent retrospectives at the Denver Art Museum in Colorado; Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts; the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.; and the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona. Her publications include The Meadow (Radius Books, 2015), Natural Histories (Radius Books, 2013), Trees: National Champions (MIT Press; Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, 2005), and Chasing the Light (Nightwood Press, 2002). Bosworth grew up in Novelty, Ohio. She currently lives in Massachusetts, where she is professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.