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.
Last Night
Last night I was happy, your white body beside me
breathing, the sheet rising and falling: why did I see,
just at the moment when sleep comes, the face
of poor Alan Gardner from high school, forgotten for twenty years?
It was your whiteness, the sheet rising and falling in the hot night,
that resurrected him, brought him back for a moment
from Viet Nam, disentangled from that tree
and the death that fluttered, briefly, in all the papers:
how, snagged on a branch, his parachute floated whitely,
it opened and closed like a huge and useless lung;
he screamed, and the machine guns tore him apart—
I woke with a small convulsion; he vanished, poor Alan,
spirited back to nothingness; and you were beside me, breathing.
We were still breathing.
River
long ago
South, south
of the edge of town,
the Negroes lived
in tiny houses
along the river;
high on a bluff
upstream, our city
lay half awake
on hard gray stone.
There came, at times,
the vast ideas
of passing clouds,
but the river below us,
flat and glittering,
never appeared
to move. —We were
so far, we thought,
from anywhere!
We’d haunt the depot,
where shadows twitched
in sleep to occasional
shrieks of trains;
or else stare up
as Pipers, frail
as insects caught
in beads of amber,
struggled aloft
to hover, sunlit,
then disappeared
in thickening air.
We followed the river
to City Park,
where it came to a sudden,
majestic boil—
collapsing over
the Third Street dam.
Fascinating,
the patterns in
those webs of foam;
endless the stumps
of trees, the hat,
and shattered door
that whirled in the water,
rose in a rush,
and were sucked back in.
The undertow
enchanted them.
But we forged onward,
south, south,
to the edge of town,
to the gravel pits
and mudflats where
flamboyant and sad
under yellow maples
we saw the houses
of pink and gold.
They looked like stamps
someone had stuck
in an album, once;
they looked like flags
from somewhere far—
and hot, and poor—
left out in the rain
till the colors ran.
Black Lab
And it so happens
that ink darkens the page, the mind of the dreamer
flows, and the snowy yard grows dense
suddenly with unexpected animals,
with lost dogs, with shoes and footprints, tatters
of old tunes and the wail of sirens
that sounded thirty years ago. Where
have they kept themselves, so long? And why
are the dogs still puppies, the slide trombones
in the band that plays in the public park
still shiny, although the audience
has wilted and turned white? And why, when
the black Labrador comes and licks your hand,
this rush of happiness? Good dog. Nothing
is more mysterious than the way things are.