Get a Job

Just over 16, a cigarette smoking boy and a bit, I spent the summer digging ditches, And carrying heavy things         at at Bloomingdale School site. I learned how a back-hoe works, and how to handle a shovel, And multiple words not found in the dictionary. Sullivan County, Tennessee, a buck twenty an hour, 1952. Worst job of my life, but I stuck it out.

Everyone else supported a family, not me. I was the high school kid, and went home Each night to my mother’s cooking.         God knows where the others went. Mostly across the line into Scott County, Virginia, I think, Appalachian appendix, dead end. Slackers and multipliers, now in, now out of jail, on whom I depended. Cold grace for them.     God rest them all road ever they offended,

To rhyme a prominent priest.     Without a ministry, without portfolio, Each morning I sought them out For their first instructions, for their laying on of hands. I wish I could say that summer changed my life, or changed theirs, But it didn’t. Apparently, nothing ever does. I did, however, leave a skin there. A bright one, I’m told, but less bright than its new brother.