The Quarry

Reading the Iliad in Homer’s Greek at the Cedar Valley Quarry

Reading the Iliad in Homer’s Greek at the Cedar Valley Quarry Ancient words are spoken on a moonlit stage of stone. Hero Achilles struts (he loves the limelight), prays to his mother, Thetis, the lovely sea-nymph, weeping: Why was I born to live for a moment, and die dishonored? —heads to his tent, and sulks. The war continues: eight years, nine, and now the old men of Troy are leaning against the ramparts, the sun-warmed stone, complaining: Let her return to Greece, she’s a curse upon us— their voices rustling, Homer says, like the dry sound of cicadas, the same sound we hear tonight in the branches waving above us, the vague oaks spiraling upward. Hypsenor groaned, and his soul went off to Hades, weeping. Phereklos shrieked: the spear drove through his belly: it pierced the bladder and he fell, thunderous, onto his back and died. Pedaios died, and Astynöos, and Thöon the son of Phaenops— the spear entered his mouth; it split the tongue; he dropped, 25 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. and his legs drummed the dust. And the old man his father howled: he had no sons now. He died childless, and his wealth was scattered among distant relations. Ancient griefs. They move us, the vowel-rich words passed on through a hundred generations: from war to war to war. Tonight they seem the ceaseless modulations of the wind that sweeps the cedars and cottonwoods on the fringe of the stone plain, and grinds the stone cliffs that surround the plain as a theater’s billowing curtains shroud a stage. And what is the earth’s crust but a vast graveyard in which the remains of millions of generations are memorialized?—so Agassiz wrote, six generations ago, as America’s civil war was about to start. Here, no bronzes and no marbles, no cinerary urns of alabaster. No boy or girl of stone in chiton or himation sleeps in the deep alluvial Iowa soil. No dark canopic jars. Only syllables. Only breath: Surely my brothers Castor and Pollux are coming on fast ships to Troy: what can have kept them? 26 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. So Helen said; but already the sprouting far-off Spartan earth they loved had received them both— and the small music of the cicadas flows; and moonlight plucks the cedars like a lyre. Someone is singing of sea slug and sea lily, stone buds on stalks of stone: from the dust of stone the dead rise, swirl in the wind like moths, and sink again. As when, late afternoons in September, goldenrod pollen drifts in heavy air like particles of summer, or like confetti lavished at some union of the gods of Earth and Time: the pods of milkweed burst and release their thousand filaments, bright in sunlight, and the sunflower droops its giant head: a golden powder dusts the green grass beneath— so the scarred moon ascends, dissolves small forms in large ones: water laps its shimmering mirror: cliffsides, cloudshapes, moon, and humans deliquescent: we too flowing into the stone. 27 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. ...