What is this that so ungainly floats
and bobs there amid the water trash?
What amphibian horror, ghastly white
in the darkling gorge, haunts the Whirlpool?
This is the husk that held her in life;
that loved, cuddled warm, and was loved.
Then she knew joy and laughed; grief and cried,
'til, on a night like other nights,
she leapt into the river and died ...


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As a student I worked as a toll collector on the interntional bridges at Niagara Falls. One midnight shift a young woman jumped off the Whirlpool Rapids Bridge, on my watch. Years later, this poem was part of my attempt to deal with the event.

The title referes to the fact that a body will surface ten days after it enters the river, if it surfaces at all.