Overcast and cool. Behind the occasional calls of wood pewee and solitary vireo, a continuous, grinding whine from the quarry. It’s Monday.
quarry
After all-night rain, the sound of rushing water in all directions. I can barely hear the birds. A distant, dull clanking from the quarry.
Sunny and warm; the air fills with insects. A sudden boom from the quarry two miles away. I feel the mountain tremble under my chair.
A muffled explosion from the east: more dynamiting of the valley’s limestone. The sparrows in the lilac act like nothing happened.
Quarry roar, how I have not missed you! But from the other direction, out of the mist, the yellow-billed cuckoo’s soft call.
A flat-gray sky. Train whistles and quarry noise travel up the hollow, accompanying two overlapped umbrellas, one black, one white.
Sound is out of the east. And even first thing in the morning, the machines at the quarry sound tired. They bellow. They groan. They keen.
Sound is out of the east: a ululating quarry truck, a train whistle that won’t shut up. Clouds thin just where the sun is—a sudden glow.
Mist and quarry noise. In my four-day absence, green has drained from the trees, and the aliens in my yard have put up three blue flowers.
The rhythmic thumping of a monstrous digger at the quarry two miles away. My father hollers from his front porch to come look at a mole.
Fog in the treetops, lit up by the sun. Wingbeats of a large bird. The distant chirping of quarry trucks in reverse, one high, one low.
A loud blast from the quarry two miles away: the kind of literal “terrorist attack on American soil” nobody but the neighbors ever mentions.
A distant quarry truck’s reverse beeper has gone bad, and trills just like a digital alarm clock. Dueling chickadees tumble through the air.
White bars of frost where shadows span the yard. I listen to the roar of the nearby quarry, outpost of a Republican money machine.