Our Falls / sonia farmer

We hear it before we see it. Climb
down into the voice of the mountain.
The scene unfolds before the fingers
of bare branches: a litany of white.
.
The realization of your words are
swallowed by mist. The lens of the camera
becomes many lenses; the falls become
many falls, the falls expand. Or maybe
they were always that way.
.
We have flocked here to realize this:
there is no world, just the voice of water
expanding forever outward
in the rounded bellies of water droplets
stuck to our lashes. The branches point
as if we can no longer trust our eyes, and
we can’t. They’re right. The invisible
becomes visible. Our wet eyelashes
in slow motion on tape: this makes sense.
.
We too own control. We can decipher bubbles
born and breaking, the particular notes of memory:
a young girl tucked into a gate, a little
bicycle carriage, birds tangled with clouds
on phone lines, the exact angles of cliffs,
the patterns of sea foam beneath a bridge
for bungee-jumpers. We fall over and
over toward a body of water but
are carried again upward, and this is how
we are not like waterfalls. We understand
bridges and stop signs and the desire
to own gravity.
.
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