Mama Colorado says a band of cicadas plays Cat Stevens
every night in her head.
They’re half a key sharp, always, she says.

I ask her what song and she hums “The Wind.”

The bench we share outside the General Store has one loose leg,
I’ve come to tell her that Keiko has died.
A giant tumor hidden in the silver fur of her neck, I’m supposed to say,
and they had to come put her down.

But instead I listen to her hum the same tune over and over
as we wobble back and forth
watching the mouth of the quarry swallow, voraciously,
her insufficient notes.
And I peel paint chips from the wooden feather on Totem Joe’s headdress.
She gently scratches my knee with dirty crusted fingernails
like I’m Keiko
and this is any afternoon of theirs.

There is nothing here.
We sit outside the General Store and this is what I want to tell the black Mercedes
that kicks dirt and shavings from discarded marble blocks,
cut and abandoned by the quarry,
in our faces.
The tourists come before the snow does because they know they don’t belong,
And Mama Colorado whistles for Keiko to come nip at their heels,
and scare them deeper, from the mouth to the throat of the quarry.
The calloused paws don’t respond and
she lines her face with concern,
twirling wisps of wiry gray hairs that escape from her single braid
and humming,
slower and softer now.

Marble dust returns to its sleep on the semi-frozen ground.
The forecast will soon say snow forever
but snow is a lot louder
and so I think they mean marble dust.
All I can hear are tone-deaf cicadas
and so they must mean marble dust.

Mama Colorado says the quarry is empty.  It’s an eggshell with the yoke dynamited out.
Rusted orange cranes came to decide this is pure and this is white, she said,
perfect for our monuments and our sculptures,
A ‘Tomb of the Unknowns!’ they cried.

I think that one day the orange cranes and their polished-shoe people
will want to botox it all when it sags and wilts from sun damage
and the tattooed names of war veterans.
And they will come back to scratch
and tap the inside of the quarry for younger stone, but instead they’ll be smacked
with echoes of themselves thrown at them by the quarry in self-defense
and they’ll run, terrified and red-faced, right on out of here.

But the quarry still coughs enough dust to pad the ground before the snow
and to cake and dry the inside of my nose
chalking math equations in iron oxide on the tree bark
and smelling of crushed freshwater pearls
or raw sulphur
ready to be sprinkled like a cardamom garnish on holiday desserts
next to cut rectangular blocks of marble in a field
of starving Christmas trees.

The fringe on Mama Colorado’s grey sweater hangs far below her hands and
she looks wise,
like a storm cloud weighing over a mountain peak.

She stops her humming.
No more cicadas?  I ask.

No.  Now it’s a goddam army of crickets, she says.
I fed the cicadas to the quarry, she said, and
Mama Colorado asks me what I’ll feed it.

I take her hand from my knee and hold the edge of her stretched sweater
We walk down the road to a broken fence where
Keiko curls around herself on a mound of cold dirt.
She lies at the bed of a browning Pine tree,
but the afternoon wind is brushing her fur in the wrong direction
like a feather caught on a branch and she does not fight it.
We pick her up and walk to the mouth of the quarry
And back into the throat
And down into the stomach
And leave her where our breaths linger and float
like small ghosts escaping our chests to hide in the rock.
I hear minerals squeeze water droplets that slip and explode so slow.
I hear crunching tires and crisp shouts that slice open the marble so fast.

Mama Colorado takes my hand and I think she wants to leave,
but we just stand and inhale and exhale the cold shivers of dying organs.