Water starts this poem in motion and ends it as stone. In between, a landscape turns into a state of mind. The river that rushes "over edge of horizon" becomes sleep itself, and the sleeper settles into the riverbed. The poem has no title, only three asterisks, and it reads like one long breath that slows line by line until it stops.
The first two stanzas set up a vast downhill movement. Water falls "to soft mist," flows "from mountains to below limit," and finally gathers as "pooling harmony." The verbs lose speed as they go, from rushing to falling to flowing to pooling. The phrase "below limit" is slightly off ordinary English, with no article and no "the." Judging by what follows, it could hint at a threshold being crossed, the point where waking thought slips under the surface. That is an inference, but the poem keeps nudging us toward it.
Then comes the plain statement at the poem's centre: "Sleep is the water." The images that follow are bodily and a little uncomfortable. "River sand in eyes" is the familiar grit of tiredness, and "river stone eyelids" makes the lids heavy and immovable. Here the poem does something with form. Nearly every stanza, by my count, follows a haiku-like pattern of five, seven and five syllables, but in this stanza the middle line shrinks to five. The line where sleep arrives is the one cut short, as if the eyes close halfway through. Whether or not this was planned, the effect is real.
There is no rhyme. The music comes from sound and repetition instead. The soft *w* of "water," "wet" and "whispers" and the hush of *s* in "sleep," "sand," "stone" and "stories" make the poem sound like what it describes. The echoes between stanzas matter even more. "Water rushes far" returns as "Sleep rushes over," and "Falling to soft mist" returns as "Eyes fall over the abyss." The horizon's gentle edge has become an abyss, and the mist that softened the fall has gone. The same movement now feels more threatening, because it is happening to a person.
The middle of the poem is a story within the poem. "Wet whispers echo / Telling stories in dry voice" is a small paradox. The water speaks, yet the voice is dry, like something worn smooth by retelling, or like the flat voice of a dream. The tale it tells ("A boy swam here once / Lovers met here long ago") is simple and in the past tense. Its inverted last line, "Nourished were they all," sounds like an old tale or ballad. The word "here" appears in each line of the story, pinning memory to place. The place seems to hold its people the way a riverbed holds stones: childhood, love and nourishment all settle into it.
The last line is the most open. "River stone dreams now" can be read two ways. A stone may be dreaming, or the dreams themselves may now be made of river stone. Either way, the eyelids of stanza three have become something more, and the sleeper has joined the landscape. "Now" is the only moment of true present tense in the poem, as if everything before it were water moving toward this stillness. A darker reading, in which this sleep is closer to death, is possible, but the poem never says so. The "abyss" is frightening while "dreams" is almost tender, and the poem leaves that tension in place.
What makes it worth studying is how much it does with one controlled metaphor. It never explains why sleep is water. It builds the idea through repeated words, a short line placed at the right moment, and an ending that loops back to the opening. In a form this small, each repeated word does a lot of work, and this poem shows that clearly.