Rodney Jones

I dug a ditch three feet deep and eighteen inches wide
From where the roots had broken through
The Orangeburg pipe and clogged the line

To the end of the drive, and turned and dug
At a perpendicular out a ways and down
To tie in with the junction at the sewer main.

With a shovel and pick, with my sore back
And poet's hands, I accomplished this:
A narrow hole and deep, but undercut at the edges —

The chert kept sliding there. It was like a problem
With law or philosophy. The more
I threw out, the more kept pouring in.

Better the next afternoon when you joined me,
Sweating out your first day home from college
When others might have slept or shopped.

I could not see you, the hole had grown
So vast by then, but heard your rock can
Rattling in the depths, and an occasional

Shit or goddam, or an allusion to The Inferno.
Did I seem remote? Father was never so proud
Of daughter. We finished excavating by dark,

Snow clouds rolling toward us from the prairie.
That night we were like a Dorothea Lange family,
Hoarding water, using buckets instead of toilets.

Now in late spring I come back to our work,
And the pipe you fitted by cheating at the joints,
Silent in the underground, taking crap, still holding.

---

"For Alexis" is from Elegy for the Southern Drawl by Rodney Jones (Houghton Mifflin). © Rodney Jones 1999.
Used by permission of the author and Houghton Mifflin.