A bird that keeps vanishing into a river is a fitting emblem for memory, and Dave Bonta builds his poem around it. The water ouzel, a small songbird that feeds in fast mountain streams, is introduced "appearing & disappearing," and the phrase does what it describes. The ampersand tucks the two verbs together so closely that the bird seems to blink in and out of view. The memory behaves the same way. The speaker recalls a first river west of the Great Divide, and everything else arrives in fragments: a bird, a couple, a brother's explanation, a moving beak.
The poem is a single sentence with no punctuation until the final full stop, so it runs on like the "swift current" of its opening. Nothing rhymes, and the rhythm is loose free verse in short lines of three to six syllables. Several line breaks work like small physical gestures. "Who mimed its comic / curtsying on shore" breaks after "comic," so that the next line dips into "curtsying" the way the bird dips on its rock. Elsewhere the break holds back an explanation: "wings like oars because / its feet were unwebbed." The word "because" hangs at the line's end, and the reasoning arrives only when you turn the corner. The sound of the poem is quietly patterned too. The *w* sound surfaces again and again, in "water," "west," "walking," "wings," "watching," "wondering," and "watery," so the language seems to run with the river it describes. Against this softness comes the one hard word of noise, "roar."
The middle of the poem is about people trying to share an animal's life through imitation. The couple outside their camper mime the ouzel's curtsy, and the brother puts it into words, picturing the bird "walking / among the rounded / stones on the bottom / or flying underwater." That image is strange and lovely. The same creature walks and flies in an element where neither should work, and it manages with unwebbed feet, using its wings like oars. Bonta lets the brother's matter-of-fact "because" sit beside the wonder without comment. The humans in the poem are companionable, gesturing and explaining and watching together. The bird, by contrast, lives in what the last lines call "watery solitude."
That contrast drives the turn. The couple's mime and the brother's description are both outside views, and in the final lines the speaker wants to get inside. The bird surfaces, "inaudible over the roar of rapids," and the speaker watches its beak move without hearing anything. The syntax makes "inaudible" lean in two directions. It could describe the bird, the beak, or whatever sound the beak makes, and the vagueness is part of the effect. The speaker does not claim the bird is singing. All that can be seen is a mouth moving in a noise too big to let any sound through. The poem then asks, without a question mark, "what that watery solitude / sounded like / from within." The indirect question keeps the ending hushed, and the poem ends on "within," the one place the speaker cannot go.
The title looks different by then. The Continental Divide is the geographic line that sets the opening scene, but the poem is also about a different kind of divide, between one creature and another, and between what can be mimed or described and what can only be lived. The repeated "I remember" at the start and near the end frames the poem as an act of recollection. The final move is not toward more memory but toward imagination, a deliberate step past what the speaker actually saw.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It does not pretend that attention can dissolve the gap between a person and a bird. It pays close attention, to the curtsy, the stones, the oar-like wings, the silent beak, and it lets that attention end in honest curiosity. The poem finds its feeling in the limit of knowing, and its quiet last line suggests that wondering about another creature's inner world may be the most respectful thing we can do.