Listen: On this night, the house is an organ, an orchestra, a bellowing storm. The stream roars under a bridge and balconies, channeling into rapids, leaping and crashing onto boulders below. Nothing is silent this night—forested as dusk without sun, cloaked by rain that thunders as if to announce water is coming to find the path of least resistance, to find her way home.
This is a home of water, falling water, falling everywhere: over flat roofs and cantilevered terraces, sculpted balconies under drains and downspouts, pooling in flagstones rippled by ancient seas. Water roils in the rising stream below. Rain pools at thresholds, snaking in slivers between stones and stucco, as drips grow to drench on the verge of drowning. I am on solid ground enough to hear instrumental differences. Pattering. Pouring. Water is music. Inside and out—
—this stream defies definition as rain fills crevices, spills down walls and slopes. Seeps spring to life. A statue clasps hands: pleading or in prayer. A sculpted head of Buddha weeps. Descending steps slicken with rising waters, no longer still as a splash but a maelstrom, warning to stop and shrink to human size.
Pause, for a moment, to hear a call that is always falling. Water calls to what was here before, freezing and thawing, as possible futures surge in storm. It is a wonder this house doesn’t also fall. The walls stand solid as boulders brace halls and hearth, aging as trace fossils and humans who lived here for a time, hanging in the balance of: house and water, bone and fire, wood and stone, earth and air.
Lightning flashes. Rain ricochets off leaves and branches. Each spout of the house becomes a liquid trumpet, arcing into action, as claps of thunder clash like cymbals.
Listen:
You, too, are a body of water.
Slip inside your skin. Drink in this sound. Move inside to lay down on stones. Press your hands to the ground to hear elements beyond what any human can compose. This is less about looking than listening within an architecture of attention, as if inside a tolling bell. Live, for a moment, within falling water, solid as liquid, leaking as storms elsewhere stream here—
Hear—
You are learning where water leaves her marks, in and out of sight, in every drip and pore that soaks your skin and seeps through forest, rooted in soils where trees sometimes fall, too. Falling leaves, falling snow, falling rain, all running into
A storm—like this tonight—invites listening to let go of any singular sense of water, whose story continues after you leave. When Fallingwater closes for the night, you ride through the storm to a cabin upstream where you are a guest. One might think you are alone. But listen closer: in the kitchen sink, you turn on a faucet to wash your hands and fill a glass to drink. Rain patters the roof. Off the back porch, frogs bellow in a pond. And steps away, Bear Run sings into the dark.
_____
Gretchen Ernster Henderson is a writer, educator, artist, musician, gardener, and body of water. Her fifth book, Life in the Tar Seeps: A Spiraling Ecology from a Dying Sea (Trinity University Press, 2023) is melting into a global poetry project, Dear Body of Water (in partnership with the University of Arizona Poetry Center and Kent State’s Wick Poetry Center). In 2024, she is an Artist-in-Residence at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater (listen here).