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
Sun Shining Through the Mist at the Brink of Niagara Falls, 2007. Photo by Andrew Porteus. View on the Niagara Falls Public Library website
Watching so much water fall off the edge,
one senses nature’s power.
Standing there, you liquefy and briefly leave
like Ovid’s fleeing nymph.
Saved from a comparable change
by my focus on you, I watch as,
turning away from the flow, you return
and grab tightly at my hand.
Here on a second honeymoon, where
newlyweds normally spend their first,
I recall the lonely docks
of the train station in Detroit
where long ago you also took departure
in the caverned darkness of that hollow ruin.
A mist hung high over the waiting trains
much like the sunshot mist of these falls.
The worlds you traveled then held no
long interest. The one
around us now, beyond the well-kept
ridge of walks and grass and flowers,
is tacky with museums and run-down horror shops.
The lives we shared could hardly be less different.
Still our achievements kept us busy.
Escaping Alpheus, Ovid’s Arethusa turned
a river, babbling to Ceres Proserpina’s fate.
What is it we can learn or tell, melting
as we have in the midday’s noisy crowds?
Source: Mazzaro published this in The Sewanee Review, Vol. 111, No. 3 (Summer, 2003), p. 407
Niagara Falls From a Glass Transparency by Detroit Publishing Company, c. 1890. Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Here poor, unfortunate Haywood lies;
Nobody laughs, nobody cries;
Where he’s gone and how he fares
Nobody knows and nobody cares.
Source: T.W. Kriner. In the Mad Water: Two Centuries of Adventure and Lunacy at Niagara Falls. Buffalo: J & J Publishing, 1999
Haywood jumped over Niagara Falls on September 10, 1891, and his body was never recovered. The above poem was found in a suicide letter addressed to Haywood’s friend Charles D. Nichols, as published in In the Mad Water:
Friend Charlie —
By the time you get this letter I shall be no more. You must, of course, know that I have run behind a Salamanca. In fact, I have not been able to make expenses since I went there. You see, old man, I had to wait there more than three weeks for goods, and, of course, it put me behind a good deal. And now that I realize how much I am in debt to B. & L. I see no way for me to make the same good, and I can’t and won’t face the disgrace of a defaulter.
I have come here with the deliberate intention of committing suicide, and I have a ticket in my pocket now for Niagara Falls. I leave here at 12 o’clock and will go over the falls as soon as I get there. I made a great mistake, Charlie, when I went to work for Baker; it was all out of my line, and now that the end has come and I see nothing but disgrace staring me in the face, I would suffer a thousand deaths before I would be sent up as a thief. I never intended to do wrong, but circumstances were against me, and I am now going to pay for the same with my life. Some, of course, will say that I am crazy, but you know better than that. I am just as cool and collected now as I ever was in my life. I owe Louis some $12.00, but he has plenty of goods in his charge and will no doubt look out for himself. I don’t know how much I am behind with B. & L., but it must be about $35.00.
Well, old man, don’t think worse of me than you can help, for I never meant to do what I have, and I guess I am my own worse enemy. You will, of course. see from the papers that I have done as I have stated, but I thought I would write to you anyway, as you alone can understand why I should take my life, And now, my friend, good bye.
If my body is found I think the following verse would be very appropriate.
Here poor, unfortunate Haywood lies;
Nobody laughs, nobody cries;
Where he’s gone and how he fares
Nobody knows and nobody cares.
Captain Webb’s Indian Bazaar, located between where the Rainbow Bridge & the Oakes Garden Theatre now stand. Photo courtesy of Mrs. J.W. Zeiger / Niagara Falls Public Library
Today conditions seemed reversed :
I paced such old Emporium
As grace Niagara’s streets — immersed
In thoughts that forced themselves to come :
The aisles of souvenirs, and such
As litter up old parlors and
Crimped antique furniture, brought much
Of childhood interest at hand.
I saw small tables cluttered tight
With “after dinner” cups, scarce room
For salts and peppers, very bright
To grace some full Victorian gloom.
Then reminiscences that slept
Grew quick when, lifting high a ball
Of watery glass, a snowstorm swept
Across the too chromatic Fall.
The snow spun wildly till I felt
A childhood agony, a-shiver
For souls emperilled — storm but spelt
Gray death upon the painted river !
I found afresh the tense delight
In pain, so paradoxical
And lived anew the sleeted night —
And then replaced the watery ball.
Oh, sugar bowls, oh, strings of shells,
Oh, silver fit for banquet halls,
What grief and laughter when one dwells
On certain memories of the Falls :
A relative, in hurrying me,
Brought back a sense of time, but far
I’d traveled lanes of memory
Within that dazzling Bazaar.
Source: Evelyn M. Watson. Poems of the Niagara Frontier. New York: Dean & Company, 1929.
Photo of the Horseshoe Falls, Prospect Point Observation Tower, and the Rainbow Bridge, which inspired this poem. Courtesy of Al Knobloch
The river Niagara flows placidly by
With waters polluted by you and by I
By seeping landfills and chemical pits too
A bane to two countries; historically quite new
But then its pace quickens as tourists arrive
Car fumes rise up to the gulls as they fly
As over the brink suicides take the plunge
While after their cameras onlookers do lunge
In springtime, in summer, and then autumn too
Millions converge on this vast human zoo
The hotels keep rising, no zenith in sight
Parking is crazy, the prices a fright
The Falls is encircled with commercial lust
Most ways of our fathers are left in the dust
Casinos proliferate, lounge lizards croon
Ya gotta admit, it’s a commercial boon
Growth exponential, the Maids multiply
Soon to morph into an endless supply
Now worldwide attention is focused right here
Is it due to the Falls, or due to the fear
Mother Nature eclipsed by human nature alive
“Will he really make it, will he survive?”
Dollars flow in, millions will spy
Still spray reaches up to the gulls who still fly
Oh where is the peace, where is the wonder
The natives sought out before our eternal blunder
