Photo by Andrew Porteus
Mist-moist, past the rainbow, we make a small row
at the low wall on the Canadian side:
you, and the other, who, as we approached the roar,
often and oftener groped your shoulder,
and I, a stranger almost, along for the ride.
Hundreds of soulful strangers, high
on the speedy water in their bodies,
lean on this rail, couples, eyes full or floating,
and all of them narcotized
unawares, by the falls, through the eye,
as veritably as by the needle
they despise and call sinful.
Apart from you two by two yards, I scan
the American side for the rapids
I already know; see them as a harum-scarum
taffeta cancan seesawing in sunlight,
now higgledy-piggledy, the grey then white shreds
shown then withdrawn in the sexy
wingding; and parted from you two and from
the hundreds by the absence of love in me
(replaced by a drug), I hear
that other’s chitchat you answer curtly
often and oftener shrill over the falls’
singsong, and hear in it pain
which I can not respect. Inspecting the falls
itself at its summit, I see a vein
of the river split on stone, then mend, now folding, next
unfolding until both blend in the mist;
and to you, who have left the other to his pain
momentarily, and his camera,
and have come near me, I liken the white
currents to a groin and she-thighs widening
and clenching. You disagree.
I watch further. I feel Niagara
fill my head through the crown and through my eyes.
Soon, spilling out my mouth
with breath, it returns; encircles my mind;
builds silence. Flowing glee impels me to fall.
To fall, I mount the rail. Suddenly, in unison
with my own thought, you shout It liquefies me!
I come down. Yes, yes, I tell you. The other, cool,
gripping your shoulder, leads you again
past the rainbow, under sobering mist.
I follow. Later I tell you both
my own story (how I
am free of love through medicine)
and theorize about the hundreds there
high on love and water.
Safe where Niagara is almost hidden
and merely a moist whirr reveals its action,
we two juggle the topic literally.
The third, unsure, shuffles picture postcards.
In the park, near the car in expectation
of franker words in privacy,
I ask again. I hear you, a blur, naming
a seminary where, at dawn, you would run
in pairs or by fours, downwards,
swung to a circular valley,
hills of daisies, grey and white folds, low, up,
lower, to swim secretly.
Source: Richard Emil Braun. The Foreclosure: Poems. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972.
Previously published in Fresco, [1964?]
Also published in Richard Elman & Robert O’Clair (eds.) The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. W. W. Norton, 1973
From acknowledgements in The Foreclosure:
The President’s Medal of the University of Western Ontario was awarded in 1965 for Niagara as the best poem to appear in a Canadian magazine during the previous year.
Masterful.