There’s some confusion in the pipes.
Two men set to digging at the property line.
The brontosaurus back hoe arrives
so they dig down eight feet
by the side of the curb.
More men gather, bureaucrats from the state,
The inspector paints lines for water,
lines for the drain, like hieroglyphs
that will stand ten years
or less.
The pipes come clean of the clay and the sand
like ancient bones or ruins. Like digging up a nest of ants
to see all the workings of their lives.
The men scurry. The pressure is fine at the street.
That means digging a trench from the street to the house,
cutting diagonally across the lawn.
These men are used to standing together outside.
They gossip and smoke and tell jokes, waiting for something.
They wait a long while for it to appear.
They do nothing in the meantime, nap a bit,
talk about their wives, share some intimacies.
The gas guy arrives in his orange fire-proof suit,
helmet and gas mask. He climbs in the hole
to learn what he can from the T junction.
He calls his gas mask his headphones.
He calls to the top of the hole: hand me my headphones.
Men who coil air hoses with one smooth lariat motion.
Hose men. Men who swing heavy joints of metal into bags.
Men who drape rags on poles to hold up the line.
Men who hammer couplings against their thighs.
Experts at reading gauges, surrounded by compression.
They talk in big letters: Y, T, PSI.
Their ears are full of hisses,
low hums cut with shrill screeches.
Their truck is full of little doors,
little drawers full of grommits and joints.
Men reach in without looking.
The hose guy turns off the air compressor
and a whole world of tension collapses.
He scores and snaps new hose and starts to pick up tools.
L’s, Y’s, their snakes recoil.
The joint guy dismantles an old mechanism,
salvaging certain complicated assemblages of couplings
like words whose intents have proved untrue
though the letters still prove useful.
He pries and punches on his knee
as if overcome by the anxious arrival of grief.
The gas guy’s head appears above ground.
Orpheus returning for his lyre. He dons
surgical gloves over dirty fingers and crouches
with some delicate tool that finishes its job
in an instant.
He is a wizard now at his spells,
a necromancer down among the dead
touching the magic wand to erase all memory,
to restart time.
The brontosaurus awakes
and drags the mound of dirt over top
with little spasms and long tonguings
and a series of bashes and stomps.
The men look around themselves at last
for lost tools and some final details.
Perhaps they notice the street for the first time and,
without joining in its mysteries,
close drawers and doors and move on.
poetrypoetry
Dominique-Jean Larrey