The Quarry: Poems

By Herbert A. Johnson

Once or twice in a generation a poet comes along who captures the essential spirit of the American Midwest and gives name to the peculiar nature that persists there. Like James Wright, Robert Bly, Ted Kooser, and Jared Carter before him, Dan Lechay reshapes our imagination to include his distinct and profound vision of this undersung region.

The poetry of Dan Lechay, collected in The Quarry, constructs a myth of the Midwest that is at once embodied in the permanence of the landscape, the fleeting nature of the seasons, and the eternal flow of the river. Lechay writes of memory and the mutability of memory, of the change brought on a person by the years lived and lost, and of the stoic attempts made by those around him to elicit an order and rationale to their lives.

The Quarry is the first full-length collection from this seasoned poet. Final judge Alan Shapiro in writing about The Quarry said: “If Dan Lechay’s poems often begin with the ordinary details and circumstances of life in a small Midwestern town or city, they always end by reminding us that no moment of life is ever ordinary, that ‘Nothing is more mysterious than the way things are.’

The Quarry is a marvelous, disquieting, extraordinarily beautiful book that meditates on fundamental questions of time and change in and through a clear-eyed yet loving evocation of everyday existence. Under Lechay’s soulful gaze, the backyards, neighborhoods, animals, and landscapes he describes dramatize the often wrenching connection between beauty and loss, evanescence and memory. The Quarry is a thoroughly mature and accomplished book.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Release date: Feb 23, 2004
• ISBN: 9780821441879

Herbert A. Johnson

Herbert A. Johnson is professor emeritus at the University of South Carolina. Author of eleven previous books, most recently The Chief Justiceship of John Marshall, 1801-1835, he retired from the U.S. Air Force Reserve in 1987.

Book preview

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;