Hardness is the first thing the poem takes away. Stones are what we use to mean permanence, and in the opening lines even they "erode slowly & / disappear." If a stone can't last, a person has little chance. The poem says so in a single blunt line, "We are no exception," and then moves on to ask how anyone is supposed to live with that.
Its answer is odd and slightly sinister: "try becoming a prisoner / in love with their guard." The image resembles what we now call Stockholm syndrome, though the poem never uses the term. Read that way, the guard is existence itself, or time, or the body, and the advice is to survive by learning to love whatever confines you. Then comes the hedge, "maybe / existence wont be so hard." Even this consolation is shaky. "Maybe" admits the trick might not work, and the neat rhyme of "guard" and "hard" sounds a little too tidy for the situation, as if the speaker is half mocking the comfort being offered. The missing apostrophe in "wont" and the ampersands give the voice a casual, unpolished, almost typed-in-the-dark feel, which suits a poem that refuses to dress up its subject.
The stanza ends on a stranded "but," and the poem turns on that word. Everything after it is harsher. To "search for the spirit in the bone" is to look for something immaterial inside something that will rot, and the poem promises only "disappointment." The colon that follows works like a door closing. What comes next is not an argument but a diagnosis: "the sickness is indiscriminate & / it never goes away." The poem doesn't say what the sickness is. It could be illness, mortality, or the general condition of being alive and breakable. The vagueness helps, because it lets the word cover all of these. "Indiscriminate" is the coldest word in the poem. It suggests no judgment and no one singled out, just a process that doesn't care who you are.
The structure supports this. The poem is free verse with almost no regular rhythm, and its short, uneven lines make the reader stop often. The line break after "slowly &" delays "disappear" until the next line, so the word arrives alone, as the stone does. Rhyme is nearly absent, which makes the one chime of "guard" and "hard" stand out.
The ending is the most carefully built part. The opening line, "Everything moves in the river," returns almost unchanged, but "in" becomes "through." The first version places things inside the river, still part of it. The second has them passing through and out the other side. The second sentence also changes. Erosion and disappearance, which are geological, become "everything decays," which is biological and belongs to bodies. The poem's frame shifts from landscape to flesh.
The last change is the most pointed. "We are no exception" becomes "You are no exception." The shared "we" of the opening, which could feel almost comforting, has turned into a direct address. The reader is no longer standing beside the speaker, looking at the river, but has been moved into it. After the earlier talk of prisoners and guards, the ending also reads as a quiet verdict, since the sentence has already been passed.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so few words. The idea that everything dies is old, and the poem doesn't try to dress it as news. Its force comes from small decisions: a stone as the symbol of permanence, a suspicious little rhyme, a preposition that changes, a pronoun that shifts. It also doesn't offer a comfortable lesson. The advice about loving the guard is the closest it comes to hope, and the poem undercuts that itself. For a student reader, it shows how a plain, unadorned voice can unsettle by trusting the repetition and the line breaks to do the work.