The Quarry - Dan Lechay Hollis Summers Poetry Prize

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      were drilled by insect hexachords, the quarry

      garbled and transumed whatever sentence

      we passed upon the dark, upon the rushes

      that swayed in the far shallows, and the throb—

      monotonous, incessant—

      that was the quarry’s breathing: nothing uttered

      by aphid or amphibian had a meaning

      other than Here I am: for these were the plangent

      peeps of drifters breasting the inland

      night-tide; and the wind’s susurrus

      came and went, came and went,

      riffling the water’s silver skin—from which,

      now and again, a thin mist swirled skyward,

      shot out a writhing beard, and vanished.

      This was amazement: nothing

      seemed itself, things fluttered

      like cabbage moths at noon, a spectral

      pollen dusted us, large forms sank down

      to rise diminished, wavery water

      received the lime cliff’s image and sent forth

      a shimmering weft of gauze

      that cloaked our bodies. Given limbs of lime,

      of loam, of lamias—how could we help it?—we

      dissolved into each other, then into

      a quarry-haunted sleep; from which

      we rose renewed; a rosy dawn revealed

      the giant slabs still standing, and aflame

      with preparations for another yet

      of several billion brilliant days.

       Last Night

      Last night I was happy, your white body beside me

      breathing, the sheet rising and falling: why did I see,

      just at the moment when sleep comes, the face

      of poor Alan Gardner from high school, forgotten for twenty years?

      It was your whiteness, the sheet rising and falling in the hot night,

      that resurrected him, brought him back for a moment

      from Viet Nam, disentangled from that tree

      and the death that fluttered, briefly, in all the papers:

      how, snagged on a branch, his parachute floated whitely,

      it opened and closed like a huge and useless lung;

      he screamed, and the machine guns tore him apart—

      I woke with a small convulsion; he vanished, poor Alan,

      spirited back to nothingness; and you were beside me, breathing.

      We were still breathing.

       River

       long ago

      South, south

      of the edge of town,

      the Negroes lived

      in tiny houses

      along the river;

      high on a bluff

      upstream, our city

      lay half awake

      on hard gray stone.

      There came, at times,

      the vast ideas

      of passing clouds,

      but the river below us,

      flat and glittering,

      never appeared

      to move. —We were

      so far, we thought,

      from anywhere!

      We’d haunt the depot,

      where shadows twitched

      in sleep to occasional

      shrieks of trains;

      or else stare up

      as Pipers, frail

      as insects caught

      in beads of amber,

      struggled aloft

      to hover, sunlit,

      then disappeared

      in thickening air.

      We followed the river

      to City Park,

      where it came to a sudden,

      majestic boil—

      collapsing over

      the Third Street dam.

      Fascinating,

      the patterns in

      those webs of foam;

      endless the stumps

      of trees, the hat,

      and shattered door

      that whirled in the water,

      rose in a rush,

      and were sucked back in.

      The undertow

      enchanted them.

      But we forged onward,

      south, south,

      to the edge of town,

      to the gravel pits

      and mudflats where

      flamboyant and sad

      under yellow maples

      we saw the houses

      of pink and gold.

      They looked like stamps

      someone had stuck

      in an album, once;

      they looked like flags

      from somewhere far—

      and hot, and poor—

      left out in the rain

      till the colors ran.

       Black Lab

      And it so happens

      that ink darkens the page, the mind of the dreamer

      flows, and the snowy yard grows dense

      suddenly with unexpected animals,

      with lost dogs, with shoes and footprints, tatters

      of old tunes and the wail of sirens

      that sounded thirty years ago. Where

      have they kept themselves, so long? And why

      are the dogs still puppies, the slide trombones

      in the band that plays in the public park

      still shiny, although the audience

      has wilted and turned white? And why, when

      the black Labrador comes and licks your hand,

      this rush of happiness? Good dog. Nothing

      is more mysterious than the way things are.

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