The Ditch

In the ditch, half-ton sections of cast-iron molds

hand-greased at the seams with pale petroleum waste

and screw-clamped into five-hundred-gallon cylinders

drummed with rubber-headed sledges inside and out

to settle tight the wet concrete

that, dried and caulked, became Monarch Septic Tanks;

and, across the ditch, my high school football coach,

Don Compo, spunky pug of a man,

bronze and bald, all biceps and pecs,

raging at some “attitude” of mine

he snipped from our argument about Vietnam—

I mean raging, scarlet, veins bulging from his neck,

he looked like a hard-on stalking back and forth—

but I had started college, this was a summer job,

I no longer had to take his self-righteous, hectoring shit,

so I was chuckling merrily, saying he was ludicrous,

and he was calling me “College Man Ryan”

and, with his steel-toed workboot, kicking dirt

that clattered against the molds and puffed up between us.

It’s probably not like this anymore, but every coach

in my hometown was a lunatic. Each had different quirks

we mimicked, beloved bromides whose parodies we intoned,

but they all conducted practice like boot camp,

the same tirades and abuse, no matter the sport,

the next game the next battle in a neverending war.

Ex-paratroopers and -frogmen, at least three

finally convicted child molesters, genuine sadists

fixated on the Commie menace and our American softness

that was personally bringing the country to the brink of collapse—

in this company, Don Compo didn’t even seem crazy.

He had never touched any of us;

his violence was verbal, which we were used to,

having gotten it from our fathers

and given it back to our brothers and one another

since we had been old enough to button our own pants.

Any minute—no guessing what might trigger it—

he could be butting your face mask and barking up your nostrils,

but generally he favored an unruffled, moralistic carping,

in which I, happy to spot phoniness,

saw pride and bitterness masquerading as teaching.

In the locker room, I’d sit where I could roll my eyeballs

as he droned, but, across the ditch,

he wasn’t lecturing, but fuming, flaring

as I had never seen in four years of football,

and it scared and thrilled me to defy him and mock him

when he couldn’t make me handwash jockstraps after practice

or do pushups on my fingertips in a mud puddle.

But it was myself I was taunting. I could see my retorts

snowballing toward his threat to leap the ditch

and beat me to a puddle of piss (“you craphead,

you wiseass”), and my unspading a shovel from a dirt pile

and grasping its balance deliberately down the handle

and inviting him to try it.

Had he come I would have hit him,

There’s no question about that.

For a moment, it ripped through our bewilderment,

which then closed over again

like the ocean

if an immense cast-iron mold were dropped in.

I was fired when the boss broke the tableau.

“The rest of you,” he said, “have work to do,”

and, grabbing a hammer and chisel, Don Compo

mounted the mold between us in the ditch

and with one short punch split it down the seam.

Source: New and Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004)

Football Poems