The Quarry. Dan Lechay
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The Quarry
The Quarry
Dan Lechay
OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS
ATHENS
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
© 2003 by Dan Lechay
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved
Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper
10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lechay, Dan, 1945–
The quarry : poems / Dan Lechay.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-8214-1533-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8214-1534-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
I. Title.
PS 3612.E335Q37 2004
811′.6—dc22
2003049501
Acknowledgments
Several poems in this book were first published in the following magazines.
The Grolier Poetry Prize Anthology: “Back to Nature,” “Singing Head,” “Oak Street Houses,” “South Siders”
Agni Review: “Last Night”
The Iowa Review: “Quarry,” “Quiet Evening; Cat; Then Rain,” “Houses by the Sea,” “Black Lab”
Southwest Review: “In Limelight”
The Louisville Review: “Like a Cat”
Boulevard: “Screen,” “Lively World,” “Porifera”
Thanks to Kathy Hall, Julie Hansen, Juliet Mattila, Jim McKean, Mary Szybist, Jan Weismiller, Jo Lechay, Eugene Lion, and Alan Shapiro. Special thanks to David Sanders, terrific editor.
… grasping; whole, and in fragments; coming together and scattering; approaching, moving apart …
—Heraclitus
Contents
Reading the Iliad in Homer’s Greek at the Cedar Valley Quarry
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.