Quarry

I am not a traveler of foretold distances.Spare me the charity of destination.Give me endless journey, cutthroat wind,the gallop of an orange-winged butterfly,

clouds greasy white like an infected tattoo,the deer herd and a double rainbow.Give me something interesting.A quiet dell and a dangerous truth.

Thimbleweeds and wood lilies growin the road behind the quarry gate.It has been forty years since blocksof silken-gray limestone were cut,

a hundred years since the beginning,since flame danced on a fuseto the furrow where fossils waited,still singing of the sea.

It was the mountain’s delirium,the stands of oak and Osage orangetugged like the lapels of a lunatic’s coat,the sliced stone battened, hauled

in the horse-drawn wagons to bargesat the river landing a mile away.And cities took the stone,vowed it into tedium and art.

Red clover and shepherd’s purse twistupward through rusty machinery,a blending and passage,like raw thought and experience.

Last summer at a party a boy drownedin the gravel pit, a day’s work for divers,a woman sitting in a darkened room,saying one name and nothing else.

Dragonflies and water stridersweave dull immediacies,contend with no death but their own.On a hillside, the black Labrador, a stray

from a farm or the clenched town upriver,bolts when approached, circles,returns to her puzzled litter,nurses the pups toward no human scheme.