Strip Mining

These are the boys who are carrying
the young girl’s body down the road at night,
who are walking to the quarry
stripped long ago
to the useless rock.
She is even less beautiful than she was
at the beginning of the night. She is
crook-toothed and fat. Her mother drank;
her father was half the town.

These are the boys who are carrying
her to lie among the broken pieces
of shale.
Her body will stink in the shallow water
until we come to run in the quarries,
to train on these scraped hills.
We will see her with arms outstretched
and knees torn by the gravel.
We have strong legs and lungs
and untroubled smiles.
We knew her;
she was a slut.

These are the boys who are missing
practice today
and we tell each other that they must be glad
they missed this; we saw
that she had a fly in the wound on her cheek.
There are not enough miles to run
away from this place, her torn dress,
the heat against our sweaty backs.
There is not enough water in our bottles
to slake our need
to forget the stillness of her eyes.

These are the boys who are carrying
the young girl,
carrying the young girl,
over and over in the middle of the night
down to the quarries where they once
ran up and down crumbling hills,
their feet quick and their eyes clear,
when they did not feel her blood under their fingernails
and under their skin.
They stare at the haze that rises
in the morning, the fog
which fills the quarries;
they want to run. Their legs
are useless where they were once fleet,
ripped by the shale,
the nettles, the shattered remains
of the phone she always carried in her pocket.