Most poems about water ask us to stand on the bank and look. Dillman's "Flowing Water" does something stranger: it lets the water speak, and what it says is a chain of wishes. The speaker wants to be water, wants to be admired as water, and above all wants to be a surface in which other people finally see themselves. Beneath the nature imagery, the poem is about recognition, the hope that looking at something else can show us who we are.
The opening lines set a scene almost entirely through colour. "The green remains / And the greys and browns of yesteryear / Upon moving blues / And stalwart reds." The word "yesteryear" suggests the older colours are the past, still lying on top of the present. Read this way, the stanza describes a reflection: shapes of the shore and the surroundings resting on a surface that never stops shifting. Even in this small picture there is a contrast between "moving blues" and "stalwart reds," the fluid and the fixed, which the poem will later try to reconcile. Water here keeps traces of what has passed over it while still going on.
Then the poem makes its boldest move and blurs the boundary between water and body. "The wind shifted waves / Moving throughout my veins" turns a lake or river into a circulatory system, and the land that holds it becomes a kind of clothing: "Lightly compacted by the land around me." The line after "veins" is the most puzzling: "The life lump my skin." It is hard to parse, and I'd read it as an inference rather than a certainty: perhaps life gathers or ripples across the skin, the way a breeze raises small bumps on water. The strangeness fits a speaker caught between two kinds of body, neither fully human nor fully landscape.
The poem's structure is plain but deliberate. There is no rhyme and no steady rhythm. The lines run short and uneven, like water finding its own level. The main pattern is repetition: "I wish" opens four separate lines, each pushing the desire further. First comes the wish to merge ("be one with the water"), then to be admired ("bask in my cool beauty"), then to mirror ("reflect the world upon my self"), and finally to reveal ("my flesh to reveal your true being"). The phrase "bask in my cool beauty" is a small surprise, since we usually bask in warmth. Cool beauty offers calm rather than comfort, and perhaps a hint of pride. The split spelling "my self" quietly suggests a self that is something to be looked at, almost detached from the speaker.
Midway the poem hands the reins to the reader. After the last "I wish" comes a single-word line, "Come," followed by commands: "Stare upon my form." The shift from wishing to inviting feels like a held breath let out. What follows is the poem's neatest piece of craft, a mirrored pair of lines: "Within you, see me / Within me, see you." The second line reverses the first, so the syntax itself behaves like a reflection. The lines also dissolve the border between speaker and reader as completely as the earlier ones dissolved the border between water and flesh.
The ending is careful. "May we find solice" (the poem's own spelling of "solace") is not a statement but a hope. Everything in the poem has been wished for, never accomplished, and the final line keeps that tentative mood. The "we" it reaches is also new, since the poem began with a lone "I." Solace comes not from the speaker being admired but from the two parties seeing each other.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it reverses the usual direction of nature writing. Instead of a person projecting feelings onto a lake, the lake wants people to project themselves onto it. Water becomes a figure for honest attention: it does not flatter or hide, it only returns what stands before it. The poem is modest in length and sometimes rough in its phrasing, but its central image holds, and its idea is a generous one. We understand ourselves best when we are willing to be seen, and willing to look.