i
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.
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
