| The Falls at Night by Amanda Pritchard Moore | ||
Niagara, ni-a-ga-ra: casinos, neon lights, small, manicured park paths wet with mist rising like bodies in the floodlights. Jumpers and tourists clamoring in tongues, newlyweds with hope stamped on their faces like great gray horses galloping. From the brink, pleats of water tumble, flashbulbs from both sides blink their quirky Morse code: jump, don't jump, jump, don't. In 1827, they sent a ship full of animals over the falls for publicity—a buffalo, some foxes, dogs and a flock of geese, their wings clipped. People waiting at the base would have seen the ship hang briefly at the crest line and then a blur of hooves, broken wings, lifeless pups hurled out the side. Giant roar of animal fright—naked, bare, a roar louder than the falls and splintering wood. Even the water must feel this terror. We make our way up the rapids, the backward cycle of a molecule rumbling toward its great fall. The water opens back onto itself, slaps against the rock, wakes, panics, tries to turn back, crest and cap but can't resist the pull. Not falling but pushing, not pushing but being pulled, not resisting, not stalling, jumping. A flood, a tap left on, running over the sink. A tap and I could fall, leap the falls, jump the gap. The first woman to go over in a barrel and live, died broke in Canada, telling her story for pennies to tourists while her manager toured the country with an impostor and the barrel that had carried her over, the barrel in which she prayed for deliverance and was delivered, born again in myth. They pay $100 for each body retrieved, each jumper washed up in sludge, the foam that lips the water like a crust shivering on the surface, bending with each touch of long pole reaching, pulling the body back. Monday is the most popular day to jump. Wednesday, the least—hump day, jumping on hump day too big a hump to jump. Before the brink, water is calmest, gurgling stupidly toward its frightening fate. Standing on guardrails, I think of a pregnant 18-year-old who jumped out of spite. Did she fold her jacket first and place it on the rails? Stuff her earrings and watch in her shoes, lined up neatly by the edge? Did she jump and hope the water buoyed her up, or did she slide in—the water on her toe, then calf, then thigh then hip then armpit then crown? The pressure of the falls on her womb expelled her fetus, an aborted underwater birth. A dead body trailing a dead body, the cord still attached. __________________________________________________________________________ AMANDA PRITCHARD MOORE is currently working on her MFA at Cornell University. She is an associate editor at Epoch magazine. Her poems have appeared in a few small journals, including Coe Review, The Pearl and Visions International. |