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Against ProphecyAuthor(s): David WeissSource: The North American Review, Vol. 267, No. 3 (Sep., 1982), p. 70Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25124311 .

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visible to me a desert sunset has been

painted in Day-Glo colors. Three men clamber out, all in baseball caps,

all a bit loose in the joints of the legs, each with a can of beer clamped in his fist. One of them catches my eye in

particular, for he is extraordinarily fat above the waist and scrawny below,

like a keg balanced on a sawhorse, and he wears the sort of belly-length tear-away T-shirt favored by svelte

tailbacks.

This one leads the way to the

quarry lip, just around the corner

from the niche where I am planted. He jams the beerless hand into his

pocket and draws out a revolver. Bam

bam bam. He fires down into the water?at no particular target, so far

as I can tell from the scatter of

splashes, but just randomly. His two buddies also tug handguns from

pockets and begin pumping lead into the green pool. The noise hammers

around in the quarry like a maniac in a

padded cell. Maybe they're aiming at the fish (how do these fish get here?),

which veer in silver bursts, scaly sides

catching the light like a slant of wind-driven sleet.

The trio empty their guns, reload,

empty them again, three times, and

on the fourth round they begin firing at the limestone walls. They laugh, hearing the bullets zing and ricochet. I am not laughing. I have crawled so far back into my cranny that it will take a good lubrication of sweat,

which I have, to get me out again.

They might kill me by accident. But

they might also, I am convinced, kill

me on purpose. It would seem more

in keeping with their helter-skelter

mayhem to shoot me than not to, and

nobody could ever know they did it. I

keep well hidden. A quarry in a

quarry. Except for their laughter, not

a sound emerges from their throats.

They speak only in bullets.

By and by the shooting stops, the van's motor starts, the tires crunch

away. I am a long time in coming forth.

Wherever holes have been drilled in the quarry ledges, dirt catches and

seedlings take root. Eventually these

roots will burst the stone. Our roots

also go down into rock?the rock of

caves, spearheads, knives, the

megaliths and cairns and dolmens of our ancestors, the rock of temples and

pyramids, gravestones, cathedrals.

Entire millenia of human labors are known to us solely through their stone leavings. The only common

DAVID WEISS

AGAINST PROPHECY

At night my wife turns to the wall troubled by death.

I say silly, joking things that do not comfort her

and go out closing the door and darkness in.

Rain drums down as it has for days. I watch it run to the tips of palm leaves

where the drops pause to gather mass before falling.

Since we too pause, before falling, and gather mass,

the idea of not-being repels my wife's imagination with its nothing-to-imagine.

Worse than the thought of being buried alive.

There is comfort in words like millenium and messiah

spoken last night by three rabbis in Jerusalem: news was

each dreamed the same dream that the end of the world is near.

I heard this while scraping spots of red and green paint from the formica top of a desk purchased secondhand.

I felt, then, a need to love or defend the useless attention

I was giving to make its shabby surface uniformly white again.

Indifferent to prophecy, the refrigerator drones in the dark

like a common prayer. It keeps milk fresh, a principle

by which we abide as surely as we do the return of light.

My wife is sleeping when I slip into bed. Her eyelid scratches the pillow secretly as a leaf trembling

in a breeze so slight that if you wet a finger and held it to the air, still you could not tell

which direction it was coming from.

stuff that rivals it for durability is lan

guage, words laid down in books and scrolls like so many fossils. With a touch of mind, the fossil words spring to life; so might the stones, if we look at them aright.

While you read this, new lime stone is forming on the seafloor near

the Bahamas, grain by grain, corpse

by corpse. You could dive down and

grab it by the fistful, freshly made. It's also dissolving away right this

moment down in hidden caverns be

neath my feet. As W.H. Auden wrote

in a poem about the limestone

countryside of his native Yorkshire,

If it form the one landscape that we

the inconstant ones

Are consistently homesick for, this is

chiefly Because it dissolves in water.

The waters make it, and waters un

make it. Rain seeks out every fault,

scours passage through every frac

ture, opening tunnels and sinkholes,

underground rivers and sudden gurgl

ing springs. Beneath the sunlit quar

ries, there is a sunless warren of

caves. I loiter outside these jagged doorways to the underworld, know

ing I must go down there next in my search for stone. -Scott Sanders

70

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