A young man lies on his belly at the edge of a river, and almost nothing happens. That is the point. The poem gives us a few small gestures (a hand in water, a bird, falling snow) and lets them add up to a quiet idea: that feeling and thought, which we usually experience as separate or even opposed, might be the same thing seen from two sides.
The pivot is the word "reflection," which does double duty. A river's surface can show a reflection, an image of the sky or of a face, and a person can reflect, meaning stand back and think. When the poem says that "without reflection the river carries her feeling," both senses are live. The river does not mirror anything back and does not deliberate. It simply carries. The line also leaves a small puzzle: whose feeling is "her feeling"? The poem never says. The river may be pictured as female, or the word may point to someone absent from the scene. Judging by the text alone, we can't settle it, and the ambiguity helps. The feeling belongs to no identifiable person, so it reads as something the water holds in general.
The image that sets everything going is the simile "Like a small request." It gets its own stanza, so it hangs in the air by itself. The river pushes against the young man's hand, and the poet compares that pressure to a request rather than a force. The current becomes polite, almost shy, and "small" suggests how little it asks. The young man's posture matches this. Lying on his belly and gazing over a "bank of flowers," he is low, still and receptive, more like a child at a pond than someone with a task. He is not doing anything to the river; he is letting it ask.
The middle of the poem turns from him to the landscape, in two single-line stanzas that feel like held breaths. "One bird silently brushes the face of space" is the most daring image. Space is given a face, and a bird touches it lightly, the way the river touches the hand. The touch is repeated on a larger scale, and the word "face" quietly echoes the idea of reflection. Then "Snow falls from the old forest." The phrasing is odd, since snow would more naturally fall on a forest. Here it seems to fall out of the forest, as though the trees were letting go of something stored. We also find snow near a bank of flowers, which suggests the scene is not a literal snapshot of one afternoon. It feels closer to a dream or a mood, and that is an inference from the imagery rather than anything the poem states. The word "old" sets the forest's long patience against the "young man," so the human figure is small and brief against a slow background.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The poem is free verse, and its rhythm comes from sentence length. The opening stanza is one sentence spread over three lines, with the line breaks (belly, flowers, hand) moving us gently downward. Then come three short, complete, end-stopped sentences, each in its own stanza, like stepping stones. The final stanza lengthens again, and its single sentence runs across two lines: "The young man's hand goes away with the clear river / To a place where feeling and reflection are one." The syntax drifts the way the hand does.
That ending is where the poem finds its meaning, and it is careful about it. "Goes away" is open. It might mean dissolving into reverie, or something more final, and the poem doesn't choose. But "clear" is a telling adjective. The river has been without reflection, and now it is clear, transparent, with nothing between seeing and feeling. The hand is the first thing to enter that state, and it is the same hand that began the poem, so the poem ends where it started and has changed it.
This is what makes the poem worth reading. In nine plain lines it suggests that the divide between thinking and feeling is a feature of human attention rather than of the world, and that a moment of stillness, a hand in moving water, can briefly close it.