Quarry
by James McKean
This is Michael Carey for Voices from the Prairie a weekly sampling from
the rich soil of Iowa’s literary tradition. Today’s poet is James
McKean of Iowa City. In his poem, he takes his daughters swimming in the waters
of an old abandoned rock quarry. The intense joy of being with the ones you
love most in the world can quite naturally make one think of a time in the future
when you might not be together. When either they or you, like the quarry, will
be abandoned. Children grow up and away, fathers get old and die, time moves
on even though right here and now in the bright light of living intensely in
love it seems to stand still. Sometimes you wish you could just stop it and
hold it where you would like it to remain, even though you know it will never
happen.
Quarry
No blasting now
but gentle work – the same thing
we fathers do for daughters. We bring them
one Saturday, warm for winter,
so they might get their fill of absence,
its cleanliness and perfect faces.
And my first thought by the dangerous edge
is that we will leave them one day
an absence shaped like a father
or a single red leaf warmed by winter sun
and sinking through ice, the memory of itself
riding behind like a silhouette, a hand’s weight
left on a shoulder, a kiss, a shadow
on the night-light, someone watching at the door.
Maybe. But explain this to daughters
who fill their hands with weeds and winter
flowers and square-stemmed mint and red hats
bobbing over fields below a house
empty and kneeling down beside this quarry
as if all played out. There’s no one left
to count the crushed fingers.
The old bridge here has fallen, its limestone
abutments drifting, crossed now
only by sight. And if I read later
the limestone blocks we sit our daughters on,
tons beneath flowers and faces,
were cut from good dimension stone, the parent ledge
they call it, and I know then our daughters
will leave us, their fathers, an absence, a word
to look back into like a quarry pond
warm all summer as we watch from the edge, waiting
for them to break the surface, breath
held, shaking their hair from those clean lines,
their perfect, unmarked faces.
" Quarry" by James McKean
from his book Tree of Heaven, published by the University of Iowa Press
and winner of the Iowa Prize for Poetry.
For Voices from the Prairie and Humanities Iowa, this is Michael Carey hoping you continue to hear the music blooming all around you.
Biography
James McKean was raised in the Seattle/Tacoma area and attended Washington State University. He received a M.F.A. and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa, and teaches at Mount Mercy College. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The Gettysburg Review, and Poetry. In 1987 the University of Utah Press published his first book of poems, Headlong, which won the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writer Award. His second book, Tree of Heaven, won a 1994 Iowa Poetry Prize and was published in 1995 by the University of Iowa Press. He lives with his wife and daughter in Iowa City.