The quarry reminded me
how delicate our heads,
how hollow.
Christmas ornaments underfoot.
Quarries have corners. Not
unexpected claw: inexorable stone,
dense and rife with pick-axed edges
never meant for children to clutch
while feeling with their toes
the slick, shallow-most edge
of a water hole.
Quarries huddle in man’s wasteland
and quarries have rules,
unlike the sea
which sometimes foams
and sometimes doesn’t,
smells of Lot’s wife,
has the moon stuck in its teeth
like a caramel apple,
scrapes bones and bottles
equal parts smooth.
One forgets in the smooth sea.
One fears, perhaps, teeth
scrabbling out of the silken floor.
One dislikes seaweed
lipping the ankle.
One worries about drifting out
in the slow drawing of tides,
eternal bathwaters.
So the family went to the quarry.
That porringer of rock held my grandmother
in her huge yellow tube,
obpyriform fingers like
slow water bugs.
My grandfather bobbed baldly,
my brother attached to his neck
with sucking hands.
My mother, I’m sure,
monitored, in a straw sun hat,
and my father’s curls
already wept stagnant water.
I remember myself at the edge.
I remember the slipperiness,
the long solid slope of it,
the yellow green rock
like a rough-hewn toad.
I remember I
was the only one worried,
in the rubbery early summer of it all:
clean sky shredded with cloud, almost citrus in freshness,
trees stippled with leaves,
each one licked by a gold tongue of light,
and the water lapping,
lurching,
like soup in a bowl.
Nov 2011
