It happened on a camping trip to New Mexico when I was fifteen. Racing against time on the historic butte known as El Morro, a friend and I wandered off the trail and found ourselves over by the edge, struggling with the passage across a steep sandy slope. The moment of starting to slip is still vivid for me. I reached out for my friend’s hand and clutched at it. But squatting precariously on the edge of that drop, he realized that if he tried to save me, I might well pull him down too. So he wriggled his fingers free as I started to slide. Frantically grasping at rock for an absent grip, I can see the edge I’m about to go over approaching. Three days later I woke up in a hospital bed front teeth gone and itchy scabs crisscrossing my face and chest. For some reason my mother was sitting there and I said, “I’m hungry. Can you get me some pizza?” and in that moment, she says, she knew that I’d be ok. As I learned later, I’d fallen forty feet into a crevice, where the members of my camping group found me unconscious and bleeding. They notified the park ranger whose wife, it turned out, was a nurse. She knew not to jostle me, so they waited for help, then carefully lifted me out, and helicoptered me to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Albuquerque. The doctors there had to decide between opening up my skull or using drugs to relieve the pressure on my swollen brain. They chose drugs. It took three days but it worked. I’ve tried to fill in that three day gap with poems about a tumbling space journey though zero gravity, and a long-distance hike toward a brilliant party at the end of a death-march tunnel, but neither convinces me, neither gets to the core of what actually happened. I’ve also written a poem about a plane crash and another about falling down a well. That last one came closest and some of the well-falling material got worked into “The Endless Fall,” the best that I’ve been able to manage on the subject. The Endless Fall: El Morro, I958 Stuck on a sandstone ledge where-god knows-I should never have been, I remember starting to slip. For three days lost to my body, I sank toward the bottom of a pool where gray shapes splashed around me near the center of a fierce design. Deeper down the pool became a room: did the mind exude that eerie soft blue flame by which the walls could be read, here a bone, a shell, there an odd repeating element like the sun. Meanwhile my body lay—skull cracked, face crusted, front teeth gone, male nurses adjusting the needles taped to my veins—unconscious, away where Christ's bloody effigy sagged on St. Joseph's wall. And as the last light started to vacate that hole I met another self, there at the center: he drifted under my skin, breathed through my lungs and dreamed himself into my wounds. Like brother assassins, meeting and parting, we float in this vacuum forever. Notably, this version starts with the actual experience rather than with some metaphorical substitute and its more factual approach helped me find a way into a deeper kind of imagining. In addition, the poem deals with the altered personality my near-death experience may have brought about. A friend told me that he’d never seen anybody changed they way I’d been changed after the fall. He said I’d come out of the experience less self-confident and more introverted. But when I told my mother this, she said that it wasn’t true; she said once I’d recovered I was exactly the same person that I’d been before. In “The Endless Fall” I try to unravel the implications of this paradox. Some years later, when the poem came up for discussion at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown where I was a fellow, Stanley Kunitz criticized it for failing to invent an appropriate myth to cover the experience. I suppose he was looking for something like the space-journey poem I’d written earlier. For me, though, sticking close to the reality of my experience was the key to getting at the meaning of my narrow escape from death.