I was no young wire-walker
out of a Barnum sideshow.
I taught music, turned the handle
like a monkey for the organist.
.
A not-so nubile sixty three and soon
for the women’s workhouse, I rolled
the barrel out, scraped the river bottom
with the pitched rim of it.
.
Good oak and iron
to protect me from the drop,
a duck-feather mattress
to protect me from the oak and iron.
.
I took the slow water, where the cat had
embarked, tumbled, been rescued with
a single scratch. That river took my barrel
with a bob to the edge I never saw coming.
.
I considered a further stanza, here,
about the fall, the falls,
but it would have been
four lines of trailing scream.
.
Not that anybody heard me,
with the roar of the water.
The rescue boaters broke me out,
before the fug did what the drop hadn’t.
.
Would I do it again, they always ask;
come to me with cascades I could try.
I sit here rooted to the stage,
let them pick their favourite. Tell them go fly.
.
Annie Taylor was the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel
barrel ass – to charge headlong
.
.
Simon Williams (www.simonwilliams.info) has eight published collections, his latest being a co-authored pamphlet with Susan Taylor, The Weather House (www.indigodreams.co.uk/williams-taylor/4594076848), which has also toured in performance. Simon was elected The Bard of Exeter in 2013, founded the large-format magazine, The Broadsheet and is currently developing a one-man poetry show, Cosmic Latte.
