A Picture of a Waterfall

Here is a poem I wrote:

A Picture of a Waterfall

To get to the waterfall
we follow train tracks, one rail
mostly buried in the dusty dirt,
rolled out like a red carpet. The long grasses that line either side
waving at us in the late afternoon.

We come upon a man working with cement while his child plays in the yard
with a plastic pedal toy
that is missing the front wheel.

We pause and exchange pleasantries as much as our foreignness
will allow us. Through gestures the man invites us into the yard,
down a narrow path between his house and the structure for which
he is building a wall, through a door, and into a large room.

There is a weaving loom in the room, and the man
bids his wife from the house to show us a hammock she has made.

The hammock looks the same as others we have seen in this strange town, Peguche, as do the man, the woman and the child.

After some moments of examining the loom, the room and its contents, we say goodbye and continue along the exposed rail, past two pigs
who are tied to a stake in the ground as if they were dogs,
to a cobblestone road.

We turn up the steep road and pass an old woman sitting in the grass. She is shoeless, but has a stick with her. Secured to the stick at one end is a rope. At the other end of the rope is a knot, with another knot six inches up from the first. Behind the old woman, on a hill, and in the scrub brush, a flock of sheep graze.

The feet and underbodies of the sheep are caked in dried mud. Clumps of the muddied fur dangle from them as if it were a style.

Because we have two young children, we pause, sit down in the grass. The old woman rises, puts her weathered, shoeless feet on the cobblestones, and walks past us and fifteen yards up the road, where she sits back down in the grass.

While the children eat a tangerine we brought earlier that day at the market, the sheep collectively decide that the grass on the other side of the road needs nibbling.

When the old woman notices, she rushes down the road, not quite running, yelling, swinging the switch fiercely again and again with a strength you would not believe she had, and herds the sheep back to the hill, over it, and out of sight.

With this chore completed, she comes to us speaking words we do not know, but in a language even my daughter, who is five, understands. We give her a tangerine, the largest one left, and she clasps both hands around it, raises it in front of her chin, as if drawing attention to the few gnarled stumps remaining in her mouth, bows to us, and retreats back up the raod to a spot in the grass.

We can see her eating the tangerine as we turn back down the cobblestones and to the train tracks, having decided the children are too hungry and tired to continue to the waterfall.

The next morning, after breakfast, we drive along the tracks. The man has completed the wall he was building. We drive up the cobblestone road, past our memory of the old woman and her sheep, and park outside the entrance to the waterfall.

There is a short trail that winds up the river to the falls. We bring our camera
so we can take pictures.