MUSIC
POETRY
2010
PRESS
NARRATION
ABOUT US
COMEDY
Awestruck at Niagara Falls
The shattering din and ever-louder roar
on approaching the waterfall,
ear-splitting almost to the max—
the steep drop of megazillions of gallons of growling, crashing water—
and the sheer, awe-inspiring wonder
the first time I saw
the turbulent magnitude
of Niagara Falls
had my little boy asking me that day, “Daddy,
what’s a waterfall?”
As I was thinking hard what to
tell him of my mounting impressions of that massive outpouring of water
and the deafening, hypnotic power
of it all, almost pulling you clear over the edge,
he showed me in his own simple way, as we got closer,
what Niagara Falls
meant to him by his wide-eyed face at seeing
how much water was falling;
and how he covered his ears—his tiny
silhouette etched against that huge backdrop of roaring water,
aghast at the sly and enticing lure
of the beckoning abyss;
and how he ran into daddy’s big arms to safely
watch Niagara Falls!
Awestruck and thunderstruck, but fiercely together—
my son holding on to me for dear life and I to him—
we watched the overwhelming, shatter-splattering,
water-whelming walls upon walls upon walls
of clattering, clash-blasting, raging tons and tons
of water never-ending,
bowling us over, almost hurling us downward into
the Savage, Merciless, Rock-
Splitting,
ROARING, DRONING,
WRECKING, THUNDERING,
ROAR - RUMBLING,
M A E L S T R O M
of
T-O-T-A-L P-A-N-D-E-M-O-N-I-U-M—
mounting to huge, primordial, clang-towering soundscapes
of blangering, rattling, thundering bragh and droning brang;
obliterating every sense of self I’ve ever known
with cataclysmic, heart stopping vistas of clashing clangor—
ever-louder—
loud beyond comparison or conception even;
rending any lurking memory of quietude to bits and pieces, and
any reasonable thought to a jumble of noiseless nothings—
impossible to describe in words
as words get completely ripped apart, chopped off, bent out of shape
to become unrecognizable,
lose their meaning,
thunderously disappearing, reappearing,
but differently,
resembling nothing, not even sound,
roaring away again without trace
back into the crashing, crazy chaos of noise
blasting downward at Niagara Falls!
How could I ever tell my son what a real waterfall is,
as everything I ever thought it was, was being made ridiculous
by this untamable power
bursting wide open with just all-out sound, sound, ongoing sound,
undifferentiated, primal, tribal, and intense;
bordering on madness almost;
simultaneously incomprehensible and making some sort of sense,
yet totally unfathomably so;
washing over everything;
drowning out and eroding everything in its path;
and shatter-shaking the very earth under Niagara Falls.
In the midst of all that infernal cacophony
where you cannot hear your own voice,
even if you screamed your lungs out for help,
my son pointed on high to the
many, many rainbows arching over the bubbling clouds of spray
to where the old Niagara River once must have decided
to go over the edge and start falling down,
down, down, down, forevermore down,
to fall, fall, and fall,
and then fell, fell, and fell;
kept falling, tumbling, rumbling, thundering;
is still falling, crashing and droning;
falls, falls and
falls;
recklessly
falls
crash-shattering into
the seething, thundering, awesome cauldron
of Niagara Falls;
and then to proceed,
gradually becalming,
becoming a river all over again,
beyond the clamor,
beyond the thunder
where once it fell,
flowing toward a quieter distance
to where we all are headed,
far beyond anything
like Niagara Falls
faintly echoing,
still echoing
in the back of our
minds
when I was driving my son
back home . . .
© 2003 Freddy Niagara Fonseca
Design and copyright 2009 Freddy Niagara Fonseca
Fairfield Creates
