day SEVENTEEN

The Man Who Sees Underground

 

Eight am, thirteen degrees

waiting in my car to keep warm

Mike drives up in his backhoe

I hadn’t met him before today

he shakes my hand

looks at me through a lazy eye

tells me he’s the man who sees underground

He asks if I’ve seen Bo. I think maybe Bo is a ghost

I mean he’ll be dead in less than four months

when the kools and iron city in his liver

turn to cancer and then don’t leave

 

Instead we chase around what the job may require

I return to the warmth of the car

he to the space heater in the cab and the crazy right wing radio

Mike votes outside his interest

 

He knocks on the window an hour later

hands me a shovel and says

I’ll start to pull out the fill

I’ll need you to move dirt here and there

 

I stand at the top of the hillock

where porch meets the dirt

We yell over diesel

where the standpipe is

how far down the sewage or main is

It’s the water main that’s broken

 

I’m amazed at the grace

the teeth, the bucket

gentle through dirt

How he sifts through fill

I never imagined poetry

in the use of a front end loader

He pulls out a bush

lays it on the sidewalk

a spent lover

time served

 

Problems start

water main runs under sewer line

which runs outside the house

elbows back under the stairs

Even a man who sees underground can’t anticipate this

He cracks sewer line

I stand ankle deep in shit

We wait for Bo, when Bo arrives he is not a ghost

He and his kools and Mike and his lazy eye

spend the day bickering like a married couple

 

The shit freezes, I freeze, we freeze

I run jackhammers, listen as muscles have seizures

We spend ten hours with grey skies

We don’t feel the cold

We don’t feel the dread of the women who will be murdered

We don’t feel the cancer coming

We just grunt through shit and watch the backhoe

write poems in freezing dirt

 

                         --Jason Baldinger

Jason Baldinger has spent a life in odd jobs, if only poetry was the strangest of them he’d have far less to talk about. Somewhere in time he has traveled the country, and wrote a few books. The latest of which “The Lower 48” (Six Gallery Press) and the chapbook “The Studs Terkel Blues” (Night Ballet Press) are all available now. A short litany of publishing credits include: The New Yinzer, Shatter Wig Press, Blast Furnace, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Fuck Art, Let’s Dance, Green Panda Press, Uppagus, Anti Heroin Chic, In-between Hangovers, Your One Phone Call and Lilliput Review. You can also hear audio of some poems on the bandcamp website by just typing in his name.