Читать книгу The Quarry - Dan Lechay - Страница 9

In Limelight

This was the midwest’s limestone belly; here

the black trees ascended. And it gleamed

the color of old tusks; it held the spilth

of continental seedbed, gastropod

and brachiopod and sea worm and sea lily,

and vertebrae of stone; and here one night

of my late adolescence it made a couch

for two recumbent humans, marble-limbed

and languid as two figures on the lid

of a sarcophagus. Cicada, cricket, we

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.