In the Marble Quarry

     Beginning to dangle beneath

The wind that blows from the undermined wood,

      I feel the great pulley grind,

      The thread I cling to lengthen

And let me soaring and spinning down into marble,

      Hooked and weightlessly happy

      Where the squared sun shines

Back equally from all four sides, out of stone

      And years of dazzling labor,

      To land at last among men

Who cut with power saws a Parian whiteness

      And, chewing slow tobacco,

      Their eyebrows like frost,

Shunt house-sized blocks and lash them to cables

      And send them heavenward

      Into small-town banks,

Into the columns and statues of government buildings,

      But mostly graves.

      I mount my monument and rise

Slowly and spinningly from the white-gloved men

      Toward the hewn sky

      Out of the basement of light,

Sadly, lifted through time’s blinding layers

      On perhaps my tombstone

      In which the original shape

Michelangelo believed was in every rock upon earth

      Is heavily stirring,

      Surprised to be an angel,

To be waked in North Georgia by the ponderous play

      Of men with ten-ton blocks

      But no more surprised than I

To feel sadness fall off as though I myself

      Were rising from stone

      Held by a thread in midair,

Badly cut, local-looking, and totally uninspired,

      Not a masterwork

      Or even worth seeing at all

But the spirit of this place just the same,

      Felt here as joy.