Iguazu

“I suppose the devil has many throats.”

 – Allegra Hyde

 

This one is a waterfall. 
At the bottom of it, he leans over 
to kiss me, but I don’t like that

particular translation. 
Let’s call it what they call it
here: La Garganta del Diablo, 

so you can hear the Pantagruel inside it.
The gargantuan 
gargle, the diabolical garbling. 

All those open vowels that flee the mouth 
like a knot of bats blooming 
into a net with which to dredge 

the evening’s speckled feast.
Keep the growl. Instead of stitching shut 
the name with a skinny fricative, 

the mouth bored 
open by awe’s dull augur. 
Into an o, doubling the falls’ stone horseshoe 

so it’s large enough for the horse of rain 
that barrels over the plains on blurry 
slanted legs that swish like curtains 

in a morgue. The mouth, then,
a rounded echo 
of the jellied little orbs of water that float 

down before the impact blasts them 
into mist that touches
everything as evenly as the roar 

that drums our hearing ——
humbled slug —— back 
into its swirling shell of blood 

and blood and blood and blood and blood, 
each orb a little lens in which we bend 
huge, cartoonish, looming

in our yellow helmets, red lifejackets, 
in a long and crowded boat 
at the edge of the plunge pool, 

where he leans over 
to kiss me,
and I lean away

from the Garganta,
toward Antarctica,
which clicks in my mouth,

cold and sharp as a wind-whittled icicle
on the eave of a building where
a scientist recently stabbed another

because he kept spoiling the ending
to every book he was
trying to hornswoggle time with.

ξ

Conor Bracken is the author of Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press, 2017), winner of the fifth-annual Frost Place Chapbook Competition, and the translator of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine's Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center, 2019). His debut collection of poems, The Enemy of My Enemy is Me, is forthcoming from Diode Editions in 2021. Recent work appears (or will soon) in 32 Poems, jubilat, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Sixth Finch, among others. He lives in Ohio.