Falling is usually something that happens to a body, but in Rachel Habraken's "Still Falling" it happens to two people at the edge of time itself. The speaker and a companion stand on "the precipice of time" until unseen "hands" push them over. The rest of the poem stretches one moment of the drop into something almost tender. What begins as a disaster ends as a small, uncertain hope: that even while everything gives way, the two might "still be close to each other."
The poem never says what the precipice is. Since time is the cliff, the fall could stand for growing older, the end of a stage of life, a loss, or a parting. The text leaves this open, and the openness is part of its strength. What it makes clear is how the moment feels: sudden, unchosen, and without a visible culprit. The hands "crept up behind us," a verb that gives them stealth, yet they belong to no body and no face. The force feels like fate or circumstance, not a person one could argue with. The pair are passive at first, since they stand and are pushed, and the only thing left for them to do is look.
That look is the turning point. Before it, everything is done to "us." Then the speaker becomes "I" and turns to "you": "as we fell I caught your eye." The pronouns trace the shift from a helpless "we," to the private exchange between "I" and "your," and back to "we" at the end, now changed by the glance. Eye contact is the one thing the push cannot take away. The poem rewards it with suspended time, "a small simple second / Wherein mid-flight we had frozen." The soft s-sounds of "small simple second" hush the line. "Seemed" admits that this is perception, not fact, as if fear or love has slowed the clock. "Wherein" is a formal, slightly old-fashioned word, and it lends the pause a ceremonial weight. "Mid-flight" quietly renames falling as flying, which suggests the speaker is trying to make the drop bearable.
Hands matter again in line seven. Hands did the pushing, and nobody here uses theirs to catch the other person. Instead, "I held on to the thought." The grip moves from the body to the mind, because nothing else is left to hold. The line is short and almost clenched. The next one lengthens and loosens into doubt: "might still be close." Both "might" and "still" hedge the hope, so no rescue is promised.
The form supports this. The poem is a single block of nine lines in free verse, with no rhyme, but it falls into three sentences of three lines each: the push, the look, the thought. The opening line has a steady, loosely iambic walk, like standing on solid ground, and then the rhythm loosens as the sentences tumble forward. A long *i* sound runs through the key moments: "time," "behind," "eye," "mid-flight," "might." It links the cliff, the shove, the glance, and the hope in one thread of sound.
The tense is the subtlest move. The poem begins in the past, with "stood," "crept," "pushed," and "caught," but the last line says "As we *descend*." The fall has caught up with the reader and is happening now. That fulfils the title, where "still" means both "continuing" and "motionless." The final phrase, "darkened stillness," holds the same paradox, since the speakers are moving fast and yet feel suspended. There is no landing, no impact, and no rescue.
The poem is worth reading because it turns a large, abstract fear, the pull of time, into one clear scene and then declines both despair and easy comfort. It does not claim the fall can be stopped. It claims only that attention to another person can survive it, and it says so with a "might," which makes the hope feel believable.