[Impressions of 1939] on e.e. Cumming's [Waterfall]

[Impressions of 1939] On e.e.Cumming's [Waterfall]

You wouldn't think it to look at it but one photograph cannot tell us anymore or any less than the next; the devil lives in idle detail, detail then is what our imagination dictates it to be; the unimaginative, all the same what is not imagined, needs not more than a moment's more to be informed of their own mangled existence.

Cummings imagines/imagined; perhaps not so simply as recreating the visual of a waterfall, though how gently, if not so gently, the water lands onto a pool of the previously fallen in sum.

For ourselves, we dream of what isn't, then wake to note the disparity and attempt, as Cummings, in drastic plights, to make what isn't so.

Cummings fails in this 1939 attempt; & if failure itself is defined as shortcomings of success unattached from one who has stepped into a precipice and broken every limb to make climbing out possible, then it is a badge of honor that all of us who've taken endeavors to live rather accept the inevitable stakes, presuppositions by nothing more than our very own imposed limits.