Places I've Swimmed

This is what a limestone quarry in Southern Indiana looks like on a summer day. The water is always cold. This was at least twenty feet deep. There were cars on the bottom some said. The folklore was that a kid jumped in, came up screaming "Barbed Wire!" and then disappeared and when they recovered the body he was covered in snakebites. This was actually a cool place to come in the summertime in a hot August. Or a cool place to come at midnight after working a shift at the A & W in the greasy kitchen.

MOTORCYCLE RIDE TO THE QUARRY There’s a ride, they say, that takes A boy from the booths of red vinyl, And the girls in their white blouses, Away from the spatula scraped once more across the grill, And all the paper hats soaked gray with sweat. A ride in the summer night sky, Four miles along the two-lane To a turn off which weaves Through the ruins of a city yet to be: Great stones sliced and yanked and left On the rims of the black quarries. There were others before him, And whether he knows them or not, He’ll find them in the lantern’s glare with the bottle: The liquid clear and pure which catches The methane light. He dives And the searing glow in throat and belly Is pulled inside out by the pool Kept like ice in the jawbone of stone. He is a white angel in the dark mire, The pieces of the acrobat fallen, Or just a clean child swimming skyward. Breaking before where the remaining tower Of a forgotten crane reaches into the sea of stars, He is the lost child dizzy with dreams.