Small Waterfall: A Birthday Poem
from THE ODD
LAST THING SHE DID
Maybe an engineer,
stumbling on this small, all-
but-forest-swallowed waterfall--
a ten-foot drop at most--
could with some accuracy
say just how much energy
goes unharnessed here.
Enough, is it, to bring light
and heat to the one-room hut one might
build here at its foot--where,
piecing together the hush
in the current's hurl and crash,
a lone man might repair
to fix a shopworn life?
Enough, anyway, to light
one image in my head: this mist-
laced column of water's
as slim as a girl's waist--
yours, say, narrow still despite
the tumble down the birth canal
of a pair of nine-pound daughters.
Well, there's nothing for it but,
sloshing my way across the pool,
I must set whimsy into fact--
which is how, one blazing, cool
August day in New Hampshire, I
come to be standing with my
arms round a cataract.
...Nothing new in this, it turns out--
for I know all about embracing
a thing that flows and goes
and stays, self-propelled and -replacing,
which in its roundabout route
carries and throws, carries and throws
off glints at every turn, bringing
all it touches to flower
(witness those flourishing daughters).
Your reach exceeds my grasp, happily,
for yours is the river's power
to link with liquid, unseen threads
the low, far, moon-moved sea
and the sun's high-lit headwaters.
In the Poet's Own Words
"I wanted to write about a small falls. The large falls of this
world belong to the world at large; you can admire Niagara but you can't
feel close to it. I like the sense of intimacy these small New Hampshire
falls provided--tender and sunny in just the way I hope this birthday
poem for my wife would turn out to be."
Excerpted from The Odd Last Thing She Did by Brad Leithauser. Copyright© 1998 by Brad Leithauser. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., a division of
Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
