QUARRY

Josh Hanson

Things get smaller: there's dust
On everything, the stone that is
The Earth is broken, and broken,
The lodestone of the North pulls
My mineral blood, not to completion
But, just as final, to the breaking.
Night is an accident, spray of stars
Dusting the shadow of unseen poles;
You can hear it dissolve, the leaf
That turns the light to green fuel
And tumbles, the radio's noise
Like sand between the stones, stones
That rise between tree-roots and break
The soil: the earth is worn to nothing
And keeps on rising all the same.

 

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I think I may be obsessed with the trope of the excavation and the idea of building something up out of that downward movement. I also like Yeats, so I steal.