Over the Falls

"I am not of the common daredevil sort..."
                - Annie Edson Taylor, 24 October 1901 



There's a place at the oceanfront 
where you pay sixty dollars to be sucked 

into a vertical wind tunnel simulating free-
fall conditions in a skydive. Or you can find

an instructor to do a tandem jump from a plane
thirteen thousand feet in the air. In 1982,

a man tied forty-five helium balloons to his 
lawn chair and rapidly rose through the air,

disrupting flight traffic near LAX before landing 
in a tangle of power lines. Was it the culmination

of compulsion, a dream he'd always had from 
childhood? I read about Annie, who on her sixty-

third birthday in 1901 thought of going over 
Niagara Falls in a padded barrel with an anvil

for ballast and her cat for company. She lived, 
first human over the falls. Conned by her manager,

she never found fortune and fame, her name 
on a boardwalk tote or trinket, people lining up

for an autograph. Soaked stockings and skirts,
the water's loud hum outpacing her heart, she

walked in a swoon stepping out of that cloister,
the world's drum tumbling as if without end.