Niagara by Erika Meitner

White towels folded into swans
‡‡with their heads touching —
‡‡‡their hearted bodies trail

the floral bedspread: polyester,
‡‡used over and over again.
‡‡‡The bed itself casts a shadow

on the desolate paneling,
‡‡O bed. O motel. O girl
‡‡‡in white pants — you are voluminous

and shine like the yellow doors
‡‡on rows of identical love shacks
‡‡‡punctuated with all-weather

*The Voyageur*. Photograph by Alec Soth. Image used with permission. View Soth’s photography project *Niagara*

lawn-chairs out front.
‡‡Clouds ride past the pool,
‡‡‡faces of brick, the oil stains

on parking lot asphalt.
‡‡Did someone teach you
‡‡‡to park in a place like this,

between two white parallel
‡‡lines stretched like arms
‡‡‡saying, Come here? In the grass

behind the dumpster you lay
‡‡your head on his pale, shirtless
‡‡‡chest. On his skin, warm as

melted butter. It is the blue hour,
‡‡floating on quiet water, after
‡‡‡the sun sets, before it gets dark.

Love on damp pavement. Love
‡‡with sanitized glasses wrapped
‡‡‡in paper. Love in the violent mist.

*Tricia and Curtis.* Photograph by Alec Soth. Image used with permission. View Soth’s photography project *Niagara*

In the velvet night. He kisses
‡‡the soles of your feet. O girl
‡‡‡in white. Be good and take care.

I haven’t fallen like that in a very long time.

Note: This poem is based on photographer Alec Soth’s photography project of the same name. Click here to view it.

Source: Indiana Review, vol. 32, issue 1 (summer 2010)

Also published in Meitner’s Copia, BOA Editions, 2014

Visit Erika Meitner ‘s website

Erika Meitner is the author of five books of poems, including Ideal Cities (HarperCollins,
2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry series winner; Copia (BOA Editions, 2014); and
Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), which won the 2018 National Jewish Book
Award in Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her sixth
book of poems, Useful Junk, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2022. Meitner’s poems
have been anthologized widely, and have appeared in publications including Best
American Poetry, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times
Magazine, The New Republic, and Tin House. Other honors include fellowships from
MacDowell, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Virginia Center for the
Creative Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, and Blue Mountain Center. She was also the
2015 US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney
Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. Meitner is currently a professor of English
at Virginia Tech.

Conroy the Brave by Simeon Tucker Clark

Niagara Falls, June 1, 1874

The sun looks out of a cloudless sky ;
‡‡The winds are drifting the apple-blows
That over the grass like snow-flakes lie ;
The oriole wooes his mate as they fly ;
‡‡And William McCullough to labor goes.

A prayer is warm in the old man’s heart,
‡‡A song is quivering on his tongue ;
As he busily plies his wonted art
He watches the arrowy rapids dart
‡‡Under his scaffolding, safely hung.

A moment more and under the tide
‡‡Of wrathful waters his form is lost !
The river fiends fasten on his every side —
They pluck at his beard, they gibber and chide !
‡‡He is blinded and deafened and pelted and tost !

Weary and wounded, all breathless and sore,
‡‡More than half dead he is hurried away,
Close to the brink where the great waters pour,
Heedless and headlong with terrible roar,
‡‡Into a vortex where never was day !

What can prevent him ? O Father Supreme !
‡‡Darkness like this thou alone can illume !
See ! What is that in the turbulent stream ?
It is a glimpse — a half-comforting gleam
‡‡Of floating grey hair mid the circling spume !

Yes ! he is clutching with half palsied hand
‡‡Yon God-given guerdon — a pillar of stone —
He whispers with Death and looks toward the land
Where he never again with his fellows may stand’
‡‡Who powerless must leave him to perish alone !

But lo ! who is coming with masterly stride,
‡‡Pride on his forehead and strength in his frame ?
Tom Conroy, the guide, who was never defied,
He laughs at the danger — and braving the tide
‡‡Is bound with a cord to the chariot of Fame.

Strong was the rope that was fast to the shore,
‡‡And under the coil was a heart big and brave —
Aye, braver to-day than ever before,
He reaches the rock — and like Perseus of yore —
‡‡He rescues his friend from the fiend of the wave !

When the names of our heroes are written or sung,
‡‡We will chant your name Conroy in musical stave
When palsied your arm and silent your tongue,
The child now unborn, shall hear how you flung
‡‡Yourself in the wave, a comrade to save !

Source: Niagara Gazette, June 10, 1874

Read an article on the rescue of William McCullough by Tom Conroy from the Buffalo Evening Courier & Republic, June 2, 1874

John Tyndall visited Niagara Falls, and in the chapter “Niagara” of his book Fragments of Science (1879) he tells of hiring Conroy as his guide. About a year after Tyndall’s visit, the rescue of William McCullough took place. Tyndall wrote a postscript to the chapter:

A year or so after I had quitted the United States, a man sixty years of age, while engaged in painting one of the bridges which connect Goat Island with the Three Sisters, slipped through the rails of the bridge into the rapids, and was carried impetuously towards the Horse- shoe Fall. He was urged against a rock which rose above the water, and with the grasp of desperation he clung to it. The population of the village of Niagara Falls was soon upon the island, and ropes were brought, but there was none to use them. In the midst of the excitement, a tall powerful young fellow was observed making his way silently through the crowd. He reached a rope ; selected from the bystanders a number of men, and placed one end of the rope in their hands. The other end he fastened round himself, and choosing a point considerably above that to which the man clung, he plunged into the rapids. He was carried violently downwards, but he caught the rock, secured the old painter and saved him. Newspapers from all parts of the Union poured in upon me, describing this gallant act of my guide Conroy.

A Legend of Niagara by Florio

An Indian, in the days of yore —
Of “fish and fur’s” abounding store —
Would cross Niagara’s stream —
Just where the river, smooth and wide,
Pours toward the gulf its treacherous tide,
Like some deceitful dream.

Near by, a bear was crossing, too :
Whose head no sooner rose to view,
Than straight the “Brave” urged his canoe
To grasp an easy prey ;
But Bruin fled not — glad to greet
A resting-place for weary feet,
He turned and swam his foe to meet,
Upon the watery way.

They met — the paddle’s blow was dealt ;
With paw received, or scarcely felt
By fur-protected bear.
Who, reaching up as for a bough,
Climbed gracefully into the prow
And sat serenely there.
The astonished “Brave” sought in his turn
The “ultima thule” of the stern,
And then sat down to stare.

And thus in armed neutrality
They sat in thoughtful “vis-à-vis,”
While the bark drifted silently
To meet the breakers white ;

But when the Indian seized an oar,
To stay his course, or seek the shore,
Admonished by an ominous roar,
He dropped it in affright :

For in those cavernous jaws he sees
Molars, incisors, cuspidés —
Enough a hero’s heart to freeze
Or dentist to delight.

More dreadful still, the angry Fall,
Like some huge monster seemed to call,
Impatient for its prey ;
And shows its breakers’ flashing teeth,
To welcome him to depths beneath ; —
And breathes its breath of spray.

Visions of fire and frying pan
Encompassed that bewildered man
(Tho’ watery fears oppressed)
And Shakspeare’s thought his bosom fills
“Better to bear our present ills
Than fly” — you know the rest.

Whether the Brave proved dainty fare,
And then the Fall devoured the bear,
Though unto them the “loss was sair”
To us is less ado :
But still, arrayed in fancy’s gleam,
Have floated down Tradition’s stream
The twain in that canoe —
And furnished to the faces pale,
The matter to “adorn a tale,”
And “point a moral,” too.

We float upon life’s lapsing tide
While toward some gulf the waters glide
With unremitting might ;
And some black bear holds us in awe,
Like the “black Care” which Horace saw
Behind the Roman knight.

We fain would seize an oar to reach
Some sylvan shore, some silvery beach ;
But still the moment miss —
For Pride, or Ease, or Care, or Fear,
Sits with o’erwhelming presence near ;
The saving hand we dare not lift,
And gently thus we drift, drift, drift,
Into the dread abyss.

Our land, which boasts that it prepares
Its morel and material wares,
Should make its legends, too :
And mixing one of native clay,
Let’s drop “a lion’s in the way,”
And in its stead hereafter say —
“A bear’s in the canoe.”

Source: The Crayon, vol. 8, no. 7, July 1861.

This poem is discussed in Episode 2 of the Niagara Falls History and Poetry podcast

Florio is possibly a pseudonym used by Clement Clarke Moore. Two poems published in the New York Evening Post under the name of Florio later appeared in Moore’s 1844 book Poems, as outlined in the blog post Two Poems by Clement C. Moore, as First Published in the New York Evening Post

Niagara by William Wetmore Story

‡‡Like hell-hounds from their slumber waking,
And panting madly for their prey,
‡‡Their whitening manes in fury shaking,
And howling down their rocky way,
‡‡From Erie’s sleep, in rushing rapids breaking,
‡‡‡‡Storms down Niagara —
Wildly towards their dread abyss
Hurrying they rage, and foam, and hiss,
Over their shelving precipice ;
Yet pausing on those awful steeps,
‡‡Firm, solid, and compact,
With heavy plunge, and solemn anthem, sweeps
All — all — together in one emerald mass,
‡‡The thundering cataract ;
And evermore its solemn roar
Peals up the heavens, and down the shore —
While from the unremitting storm
‡‡Of seething foam below,
Rises the water’s ghostlike form,
‡‡In its shroud of foamy snow.

‡‡With thee the wrestling storm hath striven !
The wintry blast hath grasped thee by the mane !
And from the summer’s darkening heaven,
Plunging into thy breast its forked levin,
The thunder answered to thy call again ;
But undecaying in thy pauseless power,
Heedless of storm, and reckless of the hour,
Deep, deep, with everlasting trumpet-tone,
Thou soundest ever on !

‡‡A thousand harvests of the human race,
Hath Death’s keen sickle shorn,
Since thou wast in convulsions born ;
‡‡But like a passing mist across thy face,
Year follows year, and age succeeds to age,
And terrible as at thine hour of birth,
Thy hoary locks thou shakest wildly forth,
And scarless, in eternal youth, dost age.

‡‡Falling, falling, as if in huge despair,
Thy watery weight descends ;
‡‡Rising, rising, as Hope were even there,
To heaven again it tends ; —
And Faith her rainbow-bridge uprears
Upon the shattered spray of tears,
And o’er the roaring gulf its arch extends.

Strong as thou art, there is for thee an hour !
‡‡There is for thee a law !
Its limits an almighty power
‡‡Around thy strength can draw ;
Who forged the universe unto his will,
Can chain thy fury, bid thy storm be still ;
He who hath given paths unto the stars,
And meted to the universe its bound,
Who clothed thy being with the voice of wars,
Hath set thee thine appointed bound.
Thundering thou dashest on, with awful roar,
Yet bendest humbly to His stern decree ;
And thou unto His eye art nothing more
Than the frail swallows, that forever soar
Above thy terrors, by his law made free ;
Flames over thee, and all the fiery sword, —
Thou servest ! Thou art bondsman to the Lord !

Source: The Phi Beta Kappa Key, vol 3, no, 2 (January 1917)

Story, Harvard University Class of 1838, wrote this poem on July 6, 1843

Read about William Wetmore Story

Treasure by Jerome Mazzaro

Finding the photograph among boxes
we’d packed and stored away some years ago,
we thought the context lost, as move on move
we filled our homes with goods that were our lives.
It showed us smiling at Niagara Falls,
youthfully larking through Dominion Day,
our thoughts turned liquid in the water’s flow
as if lost in the rush of the descent
and pulled back to our selves by friendly ties.
The feeling was like what, as a small child,
we’d felt appealing to St. Anthony,
his statue holding one rib of the church,
and finding a lost lucky friend returned.
We took it as a gift to memory
from greater forces waiting to be tapped,
the water’s drenching spray and constant roar
approval of the course our life would cut.
Smiling, you slipped it back where it had been.

Source: Treasure was published in the Sewanee Review, vol. 124, number 1, Winter 2016

Category: Niagara Falls Poems

Niagara by Erika Meitner

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Conroy the Brave by Simeon Tucker Clark

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A Legend of Niagara by Florio

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Niagara by William Wetmore Story

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Treasure by Jerome Mazzaro

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