Quarry
Poems “Erosion” and “Sex from a Manual” by Ryan Kegley · Quarry: Indiana University's Undergraduate Journal of the Arts · Volume 22 · Spring 1995
Erosion
Known by most as Esther Sadlin,
she lives opposite the grain silos of the county co-op,
plays bridge with the ladies of the St. Charles
Social on alternate Tuesdays. Fifteen years since
her husband was found in the tool shed
suspended from oak rafters,
eyes bulging from their sockets,
face and hands swollen purple.
His fingers ripped holes through his chest,
and in them the shaved,
yellowed bones of his ribs were visible.
The sheriff’s deputy tried to make a case of it,
claimed something was up to no good, but
she knew better. She knew about this year’s crops,
soil erosion and acid rain, the malignant
tumor doctors could do nothing about.
He just went and gave up.
She spends her evenings as a nurse’s aid
at the county hospital twenty-three miles
down State Road 139:
sticks needles into arms of hemophiliacs,
pumps mucus from lungs of tubercular children.
Listens to the sound of her own voice when she holds
conversations with old women in comas.
When she tells about the way he left her:
Killing two birds with one stone.
Sex from a Manual
I remember
walks on cold,
wet nights when
we talked. Swaddled
beneath layers of
wool and down,
you were barely
visible. Tonight,
Venus was to
be held vertical
Jupiter, with Mars
brightest in the
western sky. We
saw none of this.
Our conversation
became figures for
speech, hand gestures
and eye movements
as if we were
Arabic traders over
grain and cattle.
Salve for healing
salt wounds. Of your
figure, once delicate,
supple, now worn from
years of neglect
and misuse. I cannot
hold, caress this as
if I were eighteen
again. No surprise
you find me
in bathroom or
bedroom, anyplace
five minutes alone.
Opaque, as if a
foreign film
without subtitles,
I searched for
weeds and thorns in
your vernacular.
Because I think you
are a good person,
you said. My ears
caught this scrap
of your voice.
Put it on a high
shelf, to look at and
not touch. Because
I did not want to
see you, I did.
We made love,
not because I loved
you, but because
I thought it would be
the last time.