Putting in Footings

Jake is the superintendent on this job,
I draw foreman’s wages.
Mack the carpenter, Tom the laborer,
and there are others
wet to the skin 
and cold to the bone—
that’s Oregon in December.

Be joyful, my spirit. Be of high purpose.
We are putting in footings—
slogging through mud, kneeling
in it, supplicants pleading for mercy,
brutal, cursing,
drizzle coming down harder.

This is the Project Site.
Tobacco-chewing men in big machines dig holes,
we build the forms.
Ironworkers tie off rebar.
This concrete we pour could outlast 
the Pyramids.

. . .

After the weather
has cleared, and the concrete has cured
and the paychecks are spent—

millennia later,
after the Pyramids
have pulverized and Jake has disappeared
and reappeared many times,
as grouchy as ever,
angels will come to measure our work,
slowly shaking their heads.

—Clemens Starck, Dallas (1937–2024)

Reprinted by permission of Empty Bowl Press. “Putting in Footings” first appeared in Journeyman’s Wages (Story Line Press, 1995) and was included in Cathedrals & Parking Lots: Collected Poems (Empty Bowl Press, 2018).

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