I. There is a place where the earth forgot to close its mouth, a caldera yawning, cradling a lake like a secret it meant to swallow but couldn’t.
The river spills its confession over the edge, thundering down in white ribbons that never learned the word for silence.
And there, if you know where to look, if you’re brave enough to trust, a basalt spine winds toward the waterfall’s throat, a path that appears to end at the edge of everything, the crest where water chooses its violence.
A step forward, into what seems like stepping into sky, and the rock catches you, holds you in a pocket of illegal geometry, a perch that shouldn’t exist: close enough for the mist to write on your skin, just far enough from the roar to think, but not far enough away to speak.
As if the earth kept one secret from the water, one dry whisper in all that shouting, untrodden for centuries, waiting.
II. One fall, an oak fell, and revealed a hint of the path.
A painter came with brushes, a poet came with pens. Different schedules, two ghosts haunting different hours.
Somehow in those first months they never crossed, never saw the other’s shadow leaving as they arrived. The rocks kept their secret, the waterfall swallowed all evidence.
They each found that impossible perch, that secret the earth kept from water, where sound devours sound, where the roar makes monasteries of our mouths.
III. When spring returned and schedules shifted, same free hour between lectures, they found each other in their stolen cathedral of mist.
No names. No words could survive that beautiful violence of water. So they spoke in other tongues:
A poet wrote a painter tiny poems: your paintings look like a toddler’s fever dream colors arguing with themselves
A painter drew a poet portraits: nose like a question mark, eyes too far apart, catching them mid-sneeze.
They laughed until their ribs ached, tucking these treasures into pockets, these love letters disguised as insults, these promises that needed no names.