Читать книгу The Quarry - Dan Lechay - Страница 13

In the Shallows

Still, as the spiral grew, He left the past year’s dwelling for the new.

The river, wider here,

held fossils in the shallows.

These were the famous corals—

Silurian, Devonian—

that Agassiz had gathered.

He made a special trip

from Cambridge to our county

after the Civil War.

The sun beat like a hammer

on huge, silent mudflats:

the Iowa River Valley

of eighteen sixty-eight.

And it was hot. He sweated,

the aging professor—

the tick, tick of his hammer

echoing off the bluffs—

but when the sun had set

six pallets had been loaded

to take back to Harvard:

fine specimens of coral,

some dozen massive sponges,

and one perfect ammonite:

a gift for Holmes, the poet

of the chambered nautilus.

Nearly a century later,

the sun beat like a hammer.

On gray limestone covered

by scratchy, gray-green lichen,

my white, hairless body

felt almost translucent—

ribcage, backbone, scapula—

in the relentless sun,

and sometimes I’d imagine

the companionable echo

of my hammer’s tick, tick

was my colleague, Dr. Agassiz—

or that my hammer was

a delayed echo of his:

that I would be like him,

distinguished, bearded, tall.

But it was Time’s own hammer

that was beating down tick, tick

on the whole river valley.

It was Time my hammer echoed

on the gray rock formations

as I chipped away another

brachiopod or mollusk,

and another, and one more.