“Bring along a new novel with you some time, will you, only
please not one of those modern ones.”
“What do you mean, grand’maman?”
“I mean the kind in which the hero strangles his parents or
someone drowns in a river. I have a terrible fear of drowned people.”
—Alexander Pushkin, “Queen of Spades”
1.
It seemed more puppet show
than opera, more Sesame Street
than Bluebeard’s Castle.
Yet ours was the deadliest point
on the entire Potomac–
deadlier than Great Falls, Virginia,
whose chutes and rapids
were like some tantrumming diva
from whom the sensible knew to keep
their distance and, from a distance,
enjoyed the eruptive spectacle.
The star of our backyard production
was imperceptibly difficult
and self-regarding.
A mere five-foot drop,
as innocuous as any playground slide,
then open water.
Who could be afraid of that?
History’s baby pool,
history’s foaming crib—
fifteen drowned in as many years.
With a name like “Little Falls,”
you’d think the river itself
was in love with irony,
that ambush we moderns
can’t ever get enough of. Here’s
the story I used to tell myself.
I tell it tonight while watching the tube,
reports of atrocity on the crawl:
24 UNARMED IRAQIS SHOT DEAD.
COVER-UP BEGINS TO UNRAVEL….
When Agnes stormed the capital
in June of 1972, a wrathful girl
returned to punish Rome,
her chastity preserved,
her disgust at power’s arrogance
become ungovernable, a nuisance
in heaven (the Watergate break-in
had just occurred), she got ahold
of the dam behind our house,
and, in her fury, opened up a cavern
beneath the falls: a swirling pit
of rock and debris into which
even the most competent sportsman
could be sucked, then spit out
a day, a week, sometimes a month, later.
Our dog would usually find the bodies.
One, a marine, had been entirely
relieved of his face—
prepared, as dead soldiers ought to be,
for the future’s inattention.
Round and round, he’d gone
in that indifferent agitator,
trying, I almost want to say, to get clean,
to crawl back inside the womb,
his skull worn smooth
by the jagged concrete
(our spa’s most aggressive exfoliant).
And what were his crimes, this soldier
out on a lovely Sunday afternoon,
this soldier robbed of more
than his uniform?
He was too young for My Lai
and too old for Haditha.
2.
Once, in a rented canoe, my father—
let’s call him “Lawyer-man”—
tried to cross the Potomac.
(Think of him as a less noble
George Washington.) From the bank,
my mother—let’s call her “The Last-of-
Many-Straws”—begged him not to.
“Please!” she cried, “Please!”
as he paddled at an angle
slightly up-river. She’d run down
after him, falling twice on the path,
certain he would drown. The current
was particularly strong that day,
and the pick-pocket shadows
moved sideways through the elms.
By this point, the Park Police
had installed a cable above the falls,
the entire width of the Potomac,
so that people might grab hold
of it as they went over.
“The world doesn’t want for fools,”
a police spokesman said. Translation:
If it kills you, they will come.
In lieu of a net, into which an aerialist
might fall and pleasantly laugh
at her mistake, a line in the sandy sky
between life and death.
If you held onto it until the helicopter
arrived, you just might stand—or,
rather, hang–a chance.
No matter the signs that for a mile
said, “Go back! Go back!
Dangerous Falls ahead!”
When for a moment, Lawyer-man
stopped paddling—was he tired
or simply taunting his adversary?—
the Last-of-Many-Straws yelled,
“I could have had anyone I wanted!
Anyone!” She spoke earnestly
of marrying the last Giant
to strike out in the ’51 World Series.
She’d been drinking; her words
were like spray on the rocks
and as slurred as the river’s.
If you listen, the drowned
will try to tell you their story:
…girl scout cover girl of New York City…
early TV game show assistant….
“Fuck you, you bastard!” she screamed.
Even in her wedding photos, I thought
to myself, she seems sad. All lace,
thin, beautiful. With the words “I do,”
a thousand dreams had cascaded
from the ledge of her mouth.
I pictured Lawyer-man hanging
from the cable (as I had once
in a dream), like a fly to sticky paper:
defiant, not wanting help from anyone,
least of all the government.
A self-made amphibian, adaptable,
adept everywhere (bravado, his arms;
hubris, his lungs). Lawyer-man
was only thirty yards from the falls,
not halfway across the Potomac,
when a much less dismissible tongue
nearly devoured him. I paddled
with my eyes, half-hoping
for a rapid comeuppance.
3.
The Potomac doesn’t care. A bad
government? A bad marriage? Soldiers
broken like matchsticks, going off
like improvised explosive devices?
It yawns at human villainy
or, like the elderly at a matinee,
sleeps right through the film. Little
Falls, that lazy fox, lounges in wait.
The unsuspecting come directly to it.
Why expend energy? Why make any
distinctions at all between the deserving
and undeserving? Remain in your den,
Mr. Fox; you will get fed one way
or another. From the current’s
perspective, we are all just loosened
teeth in the mouth of time. The rich,
with any luck, stay in place. After
seven or eight decades, we fall out.
The poor find pliers in the dental dark.
The black and brown are pulled,
over and over. (“Get out of your car!”)
Yesterday, I watched four geezers play tennis.
They couldn’t move, though they were
no doubt pretty good in their youth.
They joked, cursed, got a little testy,
as former titans of industry will do.
After they were done, one swept
the Har-Tru court; another cleaned the lines.
Not a single trace of their encounter
remained. I shouldn’t feel pity for them,
I really shouldn’t, but I do.
One winter, a giant sheet of ice,
as big as a failing mall’s parking lot,
went over the dam. It had
been stuck, the river moving
beneath it with great pressure,
when suddenly the mirror lurched
and then shattered in the water
below. The cavern spat up
bits of glass for days.
Note: Hurricane Agnes killed 119 people in the United States and caused massive flooding. Agnes of Rome (c. 291—c. 304) was a virgin martyr. After refusing the advances of many a nobleman, she was labeled a Christian and dragged naked to a brothel. According to legend, her faith in Jesus caused her hair to grow, thereby concealing her body, and anyone who tried to rape her went blind. Eventually, she was beheaded.
RALPH JAMES SAVARESE is the author of two books of prose, Reasonable People and See It Feelingly. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Seneca Review, Sewanee Review, and Southwest Review, among other journals.
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