Donna Steiner

falling

for the fallen in NY, DC & Pennsylvania 9.11.01

to cheer me up a friend writes of falling into a pool with her clothes on—
slacks, she says, and she fell in laughing, into the backyard pool of the
famous writer;

and I think of her falling, her clothes first dry and draping and then wet and
clinging, her undergarments diaphanous and my thoughts sugar dissolving in
water,

and I don’t like the feel of wet clothes on my body as when caught in rain
but I like the thought of wet clothes on her body and her laughing as she fell,

and famous writer, too, laughing; and I wonder if she wore a white robe
after, if chlorine burned her throat, and I see them laughing as she climbed
out, (unplunged!

unfell!) and them laughing later, recollecting how it happened—how did it
happen?—one minute on good footing and the next you’re a plummet, limbs
in ballet, stunned,

as though your wings are tangled, a confusion of elements; still you laugh,
go down laughing, unafraid, hardly afraid, as though you trust wholly the
recovery, not if

but when, as though the art of falling had fallen into quiet desuetude but you
have breathed new life into the practice. as though we hold that power.