Quarry Pile
Before my brother was born: a rockfall
we foraged. I remember onliness, quiet business,
the cascading at once imminent and stilled,
a bed cleared down a hillside. The sick seep
of milky weed, of summer and dust. Beryl,
quartz? We climbed apart to browse, brooding,
to cover maximum ground. I remember the scrape
and sound of grit in plastic pails, how the turning
of the littered specimens, mostly granite,
caught my hands in little cuts; the weight
numbed them hot.
So, my hands left me. This was
a temporary and natural biological defense.
I touched plants to ease them: they came back
stung. For every black leaping moth there must
have been garnet, for ground wasps amethyst—
but these resisted me. Apatite, tourmaline.
| Julia Leverone |
|
levelheaded: Quarry Pile
This poem’s speaker is effectually alone, but her “onliness” feels like the steady self-interest of a child. This is, after all, her memory (see the repeated “I remember”), so there is only a little room for anyone else. And yet, there is a sense that there’s a family – there’s a brother, there’s a “we.”
Conspicuously, after that first line, there is no mention of her brother. Her brother’s birth is a watershed moment in the speaker’s life. She implies the time after his birth is fundamentally different than the rock-gathering scene she describes. In fact, the whole poem is inherently juxtaposed with a time after her brother’s birth that we can never know. This kind of ambiguity works because it points us in a particular direction without wrecking the impression that we’re seeing the whole thing through gauzy haze of memory.
We can’t come to conclusions about how her brother’s birth changed things, but we can know things changed. And so, the poem is also colored by the speaker’s nostalgia. It’s not that she longs for the “The sick seep / of milky weed” or the stinging plants and wasps, but the detail with which she describes the whole “quiet business” opposes what seems to have been a negative experience. Likewise, behind the sharp (stinging?) geologic names of the semi-precious stones – beryl, quartz, amethyst, apatite, tourmaline – are some spectacular, colorful bits of nature.
There’s tension between language and reality, the impassable gulf between the two is highlighted here in an especially subtle, compelling way. Words like “apatite” and “beryl” get to exist as sounds before they can register as actual things in the world. Beyond the way they sound, they are nearly devoid of connotative meaning. Words like “brother” or “milky” or “stung” can’t work in the same way. Our idea of what it means to be “milky” – of all the connections it has with milk and mammal and motherhood – arrives almost as soon as we read the word.
We’ll reiterate: we can’t know any more about what’s going on in the poem than what the speaker tells us. We understand the speaker is gathering rocks, but we don’t know why. We get that she is with someone else, but we don’t know whom. We imagine the world changes after her brother’s birth, but we don’t know how. We see that this could all be a great metaphor for some specific mode of existence, but we don’t know what.
On the surface, what we have is an otherworldly and out-of-context memory. Still, we can know the feeling of “before.” We can know what it feels like to have memories from a time earlier than someone else’s entire existence – and that’s pretty weird. It’s not even that they’re dead and gone. It’s just that they “aren’t,” or “weren’t,” or something. If her brother’s birth is important, it’s not as important as the fact that he didn’t exist before he was born, and that the world didn’t exist in the same way before he was born. The speaker feels some compulsion to give structure to that time, to put the “sound of grit in plastic pails” into words. It’s a dusty, hot, uncomfortable business, but apparently, it’s also a thing of the past.
– The Editors
