Author’s Note: At the Lip

On the image that nearly became an idea, the line that held the poem still, and the phrase that had to be cut before the waterfall could fall cleanly.

This poem nearly failed because its subject was too large.

A waterfall offers itself almost too readily to grandeur. It invites every dangerous abstraction: force, surrender, freedom, law, violence, eternity, the smallness of the human being before the world. All of those pressures were present from the beginning. The difficulty was not finding significance. The difficulty was refusing to announce it.

The poem had to stay with one physical event long enough for thought to occur inside the image rather than above it. A river reaches an edge. It goes over. The cliff does not move. The water breaks and gathers and breaks again. That was enough, if the poem could be disciplined enough to trust it.

One phrase in the final revision revealed the danger: “clouded with its own violence.” It was not a bad phrase. That was precisely the problem. It sounded strong, but it was the poem briefly stepping outside itself to name what the image had already made visible. Cutting it allowed the river to carry “sky / in pieces” without commentary.

In the note below, I want to trace how the poem found its form: the first pressure, the danger of philosophical explanation, the still line that made the movement visible, and the small cut that allowed the ending to stand.