Digging Ditches
My father found me a job digging foundations
at the low-income housing development
north of town. He knew the boss. In fact, he knew
everyone who commanded a platoon of shovels
and picks. I was hired without much vetting,
a favor to my father who feared his son needed
a shovel to become a man. High school
had officially ended, my classmates planning
celebrations of freedom. Vietnam bloomed napalm.
Body counts aired on the evening news.
The trenches I was hired to shovel followed
a precise string of survey stakes. A good ditch
would pay college tuition, a deferment from
jungle foxholes. I survived two days before the boss
fired me during lunch. The only job I’d ever lose
while eating a baloney sandwich. I should have
kissed him. I had a poem to write, and a book
on Gandhi to read. The fuck Vietnam I knew had
become a trench, and I was trying to dig myself out.
My ditches would be as square as any, but only later,
after the Roadhouse, the best rock and roll band
in the county setting up speakers, microphones,
overhead projectors with stacks of petri dishes.
My father kept busy hunting construction sites
for a shovel I could handle. I avoided him for days,
but he could hear time ticking, better
I imagined. He had punched a clock for years.
Al Ortolani, a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize, is a contributing editor to the Chiron Review. His poems have appeared in Rattle, One Art, and the Pithead Chapel. His most recent collection of poetry is Controlled Burn, published by Spartan Press. His first young adult novel Bull in the Ring has been recently released by Meadowlark Books.
