The falls pour a map of rivers on his back.
He is their creator
and destroyer shifting water courses as he turns
this way
and that. The flow makes of his body a navigable
terrain where once
there were only muscles, skin and the deep
structures of bone
ligament and sinew, an ordinary anatomy.
Now someone could
make their way around him, know this body
as a cartographer
knows territory and makes it accessible.
They could explore
and conquer, plant a flag, declare a colony,
erect locks
and canals to defeat the shifting waters.
They could avoid
cataclysms and death by drowning.
Or as a diviner,
they might follow the streams to
their source
and place this man, this body, in the flood,
a still point
in the falling, flurried world.