BURGESS FALLS, TENNESSEE by Owen Lewis
to J.W.L.
Where the waters cut the gorge cut strata of soft stone where granite
resists and holds itself against the water
where the waters drop in sheets across the rock steps then plunge
in white cascades
like moving ice the liquid of glacial rumbling froths and pounds stone
a heavenly and timeless pressure
the pull of the spin of the moon the star rise the unfathomable magnetism
of polar caps stretching the planet
there beside this monument of the elements we sit
father and daughter in the misted air
miraculous as geology, as history in stone that survives
that we have survived our lives.
Water is clear and moves and you see through turbulence
the struts and buttresses
granite and shale holding up the pounding of dropping water
the skeletal arches cradling
the pounding heart and still peer with the unchanged look of a wordless
infant watching
now with words across time where air and water and stone
become ideas
a woman writes philosophy where elements of truth and ethics,
the construction of worlds, are ideas
living off the page as real as the water falling and the mists rising
here capturing light
where surgent waters have cut away the earth
we sit centuries below the surface.
There’s light and reflection, sound and respite from sound
and a moment’s pause together.
The silver-bottomed leaves of the nearby willows turn to tell us more
about the mists and breezes that pass
as if all the lives that have made us packed into the helixes
of our genes come unsprung
dozens of relatives are watching us murmuring questions
in many languages the rabbi
the pharmacist from Minsk the dime-store merchant from Brooklyn
the venetian blind maker from Jersey
all with held breaths perplexed trying to explain
the origins of this scholar
who has hiked through a gorge with her father in Tennessee—
oh child.
