AN OLD DESCRIPTION OF NIAGARA FALLS
We could not see where
The end of the land came.
The French told us we must
Leave the water and walk
For a distance of many leagues
Because of a great waterfall
That would not allow us passage upstream.
These woods were old,
Filled with highways
And worn places, used by men.
The night we heard the
Waterfall was memorable. It
Seemed a constant wind that
Did not move the trees at all.
All sound. And then
The place itself. The voice of water
Articulate and incessant
Filling all of consciousness
For enormous moments.
There could not be such a place.,
Yet there it was.
Day and night forever
Through such time as man
Cannot but fancy.
All the choirs of the angels
Singing together precisely,
In this manner, so it seemed.
The greens, the whiteness,
The bows of colored light
By day and pale ghosts of
Them in the moonlight.
This must be what prayer
Was like in power and in voice.
All our lives we bathed our
Memories in this gift.
We joined it to our children,
Drove it through our dreams,
Hovering near its mists as long
As soul would cling to flesh
And then we joined this voice;
The rapids and the rills,
The clicking of the rocks,
The huge sighing of the
Place as it continues
Its descriptions with water.
I hear you hearing this.
All of us hear you hearing this.
It is a rushing through the seasons,
A mouth unlike any other.
We look into your eyes. You look into time itself,
The way all life understands it,
Full and incomplete,
Always moving. Time is water.
Time is the huge falling
That we saw here, surely
A fair description.
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