XIII. Next time, a poet was there with an actual basket, checkered blanket spread on the rocks, spray from the falls misting the bread. They poured wine into two cups without speaking. They ate in the roar.
Before a painter left, a poet handed them another poem:
your paintings still look like a hurricane taught a toddler to hold a brush
things to bring next time: the dark that lives between twenty-four flickers per second something that tells stories without us having to
A painter laughed, understanding. Their silent place expanding its vocabulary of wordlessness.
XIV. Years telescoped into moments: Picnics. Movies on laptops. Books read in parallel muteness. Paintings exchanged for poems, insults exchanged for kisses. Never a word exchanged. Never a name for this unnamed thing.
One spring, three years later, a painter drew them again, funhouse style: a poet’s nose a mountain, a painter’s chin an avalanche, and on their impossible fingers, two rings catching light. At the bottom, empty space.
XV. A poet arrived the next week with two silver bands in their pocket. No box. No ceremony. A poet slipped one on a painter’s finger, a painter slipped one on a poet’s. The waterfall roared its approval, or its indifference, or just its water.
A poet handed a painter a poem:
the water knows how to fall without ever learning the word gravity
I have been so hungry with you in this place that needs no names
but some hungers grow until they demand to be called by name to answer when called
keep coming here keep the silence perfect
A painter read it three times, not understanding the goodbye hidden in the geology of words.
XVI. A poet never came back to the falls.
A painter waited through spring, through the thesis deadlines, through graduation’s approach.
The rocks remembered a poet’s shape, the water kept falling without witness.