Flight

[RiverNotch]

I saw the poem
in my head the first time
you couldn’t remember
my name, your tongue wanting
to say something, anything;
the sadness of it all floated, The word "sadness" caught me here; feels too, well, solid, compared to what comes next. Maybe "loss"?
catching on a bridge column,
swirling in an eddy of undertows.

Your arms spread like sparrow wings,
and I thought this is how they might look Also caught by the "they": not sure who "they" are.
flying into eternity. I think there's something in the association here between the flight and the floating loss, and it's something that, if made too obvious, would be lost: I don't think you need to pull us out of the water for this, at least in concept, and the period already showed me that you were going to make that jump cut. That said, my one problem with this is that I'm not entirely sure this is purely a metaphor, or an actual image: that is, if this is at the level of the dumb woman (I'm imagining an old lady here), or the flowing river; and if this is at the level of the dumb woman, if the image is imagined by the speaker, or if the lady actually spreads out her arms like a wee babby. Make that clear, and I think your conclusion would be crystallized, without giving the game away too much.