In the Marble Quarry

By James L. Dickey 1923–1997

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.

James Dickey, “In the Marble Quarry” from The Whole Motion: Collected Poems 1945-1992. Copyright © 1992 by James Dickey. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press, www.wesleyan.edu/wespress.

Source: Helmets (Wesleyan University Press, 1964)

Biography

Widely regarded as one of the major mid-century American poets, James Dickey is known for his sweeping historical vision and eccentric poetic style. Joyce Carol Oates described Dickey’s unique perspective as a desire “to take on ‘his’ own personal history as an analogue to or a microscopic exploration of twentieth-century American history.” His expansionist aesthetic is evident in his work’s range and variety of voices, which . . .

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