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IN THE MARBLE QUARRY Beginning to dangle beneath The wind that blows from the undermined wood, I feel the great pulley grind, The thread I cling to lengthen And let mesoaring and spinning down into marble, Hooked and weightlessly happy Where the squared sun shines Back equally from all four sides, out of stone And years of dazzling labor, To land at last among men Who cut with power saws a Parian whiteness And, chewing slow tobacco, Their eyebrows like frost, Shunt house-sized blocks and lash them to cables And send them heavenward Into small-town banks, Into the columns and statues of government buildings, But mostly graves. I mount my monument and rise Slowly and spinningly from the white-gloved men Toward the hewn sky Out of the basement of light, Sadly, lifted through time's blinding layers On perhaps my tombstone In which the original shape Michelangelo believed was in every rock upon earth Is heavily stirring, Helmets 147 Surprised to be an angel, To be waked in North Georgia by the ponderous play Of men with ten-ton blocks But no more surprised than I To feel sadness fall off as though I myself Were rising from stone Held by a thread in midair, Badly cut, local-looking, and totally uninspired, Not a masterwork Or even worth seeing at all But the spirit of this place just the same, Felt here as joy. 148 ...

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