NIAGARA FALLS, AFTER GROUND ZERO
Thundering past green islands a hundred fifty feet into the gorge, river runs over hard dolomite limestone and layers of dolomite and shale, runs as it has run for 12,000 years, erodes one foot every decade electrifies the riverbanks and plunges toward transfiguration.
People tested their mettle by your danger. Sam Patch jumped twice from Goat Island and survived to die at Genesee Falls. Annie Telson Taylor, a woman, was first to go over in a barrel. Blondin walked a tightrope across.
In 1874, an old schooner, equipped with three bears and a buffalo, two foxes and a raccoon, a dog, a cat, and four geese, was sent into the current as a stunt. After the first rapids, two bears were shot fleeing into Canada. Terrified animals raced around the deck spinning over the Falls. Two geese survived.
White mist rises from you: hallowed by rainbow, an ark to Heaven.
On Goat Island, below the spray I close my eyes, try to absorb the falling and rising into my skin, into my spirit where the smoke of Ground Zero hovers and whispers, hovers and whispers in the rhythms of blood meeting the healing mist of Nature, and the permanent witness of stars.
--in 'Requiescant' cycle of 9/11 poems, CONVERSATION WITH A STONEMASON (September, 2003, IKON)
