Prize winning poem

This poem won a prize in the Willamette Writer's Kay Snow contest:

Flow on River
(with homage to Whitman)

Once I was
naked
on a rocky river bank
flesh on granite
tender curves
a lone drape and flow
over rugged stone
at ease
and at ebb with the ebb-tide

Once I was
stoic
baking in a summer sun
squinting
at the world
and wondering
why I stayed
at water’s edge
while fine spokes of light
glanced like
shimmering gems
off the Klickitat
Flow on, crested and scalloped-edged waves
flow on

Once you told me
you like to read the obituaries --
“Not ‘like’ as in it brings me pleasure
to read them,” you said,
happy to be alive and 50,
“but take this one for example:
23 years old, gone…
makes you think,
don’t you think?
What if you only
had 23 years, or five
or just a 3-hour river run?”

Makes you think,
don’t you think,
about the choice
to flaunt away the day,
just receive the summer sky.

Are you ready, you ask,
to pass through a class III?
“You know, it’s okay
to back out,” you say
as a curious white goose
bobs effortlessly by
suspend here and everywhere

but then I go nowhere
so I know
it’s not okay
to stop short of the finish line
shy of sunset
it’s not okay
so I catch one last gaze
from your loving and thirsty eyes
and dig my paddle
in white water
drenching me
I follow you
into the V
into the splash
of canyon shadows
and fears
and mere seconds pass
soaked and grinning
the moment splendors me
then spits us out
from the river’s tongue,
alive