Summer flays the valley,

the skinless blue of a sky with no air,

only distance, a vacuum in sharp focus.

Birds ignorant of the physics of flight

hang in the rawness, waiting for gravity to notice.

Sounds are magnified; their waves roar

along the length of the valley’s funnel,

a keen of pain or grief, I can’t tell.

The heat holds us with an invisible presence,

a paradox we can’t compute

as we gaze into this enamel void.
Then finally the waterfall

like the right answer.

A stone family of serious Olmec heads

piled on each others’ shoulders

as uncanny as Antarctic life.

The water finds its path

leaping brow to nose to chin,

gifting itself to the ground.

We lie in the pool, heat clinging to fine hairs

in tiny, desperate bubbles,

our breath heavy with the smell of green.

Staring upward, specks and filaments float

across hard aqueous blue.

I am a scientific god,

peering at the sky through the lens

of a divine microscope.
The pool shines as if the sky

had scraped against the valley’s bones,

the falls roar in place,

the laced fingers of trees stop it all

from sliding out of the frame, holding

this generosity of water

dislocated from its path to the sea,

reminding us that without

these jumbled threads of vintage rain,

the waterfall is nothing

but a thirsty cliff.