Three lines, no punctuation, and already a small mystery: a speaker who lives beside a river, says nothing, and keeps a gun that has clearly seen better days. Then, after a gap, comes a sentence that seems to belong to another register altogether: "time is a woman I burn to serve." The central idea seems to be a life of quiet, committed attendance on time, which cannot be fought or owned and wears down everything, weapons included. The gun is "worn," so time has already done its work on it, and yet the speaker's answer is not resistance but devotion.
The opening lines are cleverly unsettled. "I live by the river without a word" is a complete thought, calm and unhurried. Then "but" arrives and bends it. Read one way, the speaker is wordless except for the gun. Read another, the gun is the only "word" the speaker has, the one thing that could speak for them. The sentence never finishes, so we cannot choose. The adjectives "poor" and "worn" soften the weapon, making it sound less like a threat than like an old companion, pitied the way one pities a tired animal. We are never told what the gun was used for, or whether it is used at all, and the poem trusts us to feel the weight of that gap.
Rhythm does much of the work here. The first and last lines are both roughly nine syllables with four beats, an easy, almost ballad-like pace: "I LIVE by the RIV-er with-OUT a WORD," "TIME is a WOM-an I BURN to SERVE." Between them sits the stunted middle line, "but my poor worn gun," where three heavy syllables in a row ("poor worn gun") slow everything down. The verse stumbles exactly where the weapon appears, as if the line itself were worn out.
Rhyme in the traditional sense is absent, but the sound patterns are tight. "Word," "worn," "burn" and "serve" all share the same r-coloured vowel or the same closing consonants, so the first stanza's silence and the second stanza's devotion are stitched together by echo. "Worn" and "burn" form a near-rhyme across the stanza break, linking the exhausted gun to the fire of the speaker's longing. The soft v of "live," "river" and "serve" adds a liquid current to the whole thing.
The imagery sets water against fire. The river is the oldest picture we have of time passing, and the old idea that you can't step into the same river twice hovers behind it. Yet the title says "again," insisting on return: the same river, revisited, which is also what time feels like when it is lived day by day. Against that cool flow, "burn" is startling. It is passion, but it also quietly recalls what a gun does, since powder burns. The word turns the weapon's energy inward into longing.
That last line is built from older vocabulary. To "serve" a "woman" one "burns" for is the language of courtly devotion, with the speaker as a knight or servant. But the lady is time, who cannot be wooed or defeated, so the chivalry is slightly absurd and slightly tragic. "Serve" also carries another meaning, since people "serve time" in prison. The poem doesn't underline the pun, but devotion and confinement sit comfortably inside the same verb, which suggests that the speaker's loyalty is also a sentence.
The layout matters too. The stanza break isolates the final line, which arrives in the confident present tense of a proverb, no "like" or "as if" to soften the metaphor. The white space before it can even be read as the "word" the speaker withholds: a silence you can see. Because there is no end punctuation, the poem doesn't close so much as stop.
What makes it significant is how much it holds in so little room. Silence, violence and devotion are all present, yet the poem refuses to tell us who the speaker is or where this life is set, and a careful reader should resist inventing those details. What remains is a mood and a bold, strange claim: that the proper response to time's erosion is not to fight back but to serve, and to burn while doing it.