Once Upon A Dump

By: K. A. Clifton

Topsoil covers fill.
Good-neighbor fences tease the eye
with slivers of bright lawn,
maybe a trampoline.
One house per lot, 60 per tract,
driveways stretch their flat tongues
to the street. A requisite
shade tree groans,
its spine splitting in the wind.
What narratives
lie beneath, and artifacts?
Insects probe the depths: an amalgam
of buried waste
decomposing by the ton,
all packed down and stinking.
We live on top
as if we own the world.

Bulldozers, not nature, shape the land.
Hills are cut, recast
as jaundiced suburban plain.

I picture our cul de sac
on the move:
ground percolating with pockets of air,
decay shifting
entombed defunct ovens, old toilets,
chests of drawers.
Objects migrate. Concrete slabs
sink like lost continents.

I see myself out back,
arms full from plant nurseries,
heart set on landscaping our two-story.
I start to dig
when the shovel slips.

Dirt funneling fast, I jump back––There
exposed, inching
toward warmth and light,
someone’s half-eaten sofa returns.


I stare, transfixed,
your thick, shiny chrome
and yellow metal expansion band.
Size, chink indicate
you are something male,
a wrist watch my absent father
might have worn.

Your measure of time is gone,
bold hands frozen at ten o’clock.
I tap your glass,
my discernible oily prints
all over it.
Jet-black lettering
boasts water resistance to 100 feet.
Impressive. And manly.

Say, did your inner workings
stop working because there was no
human being
to wrap yourself around
or share time with?
A father could answer that.
If I reach through the wrist opening,
offering my hand,
might you stir,
then begin to sweep the clock?

Now, I remind myself
to accept things as they are,
and I toss you
back into the shoebox
full of twisted junk costume jewelry,
sharing a garage sale table

with baby clothes
at 25¢ apiece.

Then, sitting in my car,
I watch, for a while,
an older man or two shopping.
It’s Sunday afternoon.
The radio opus swells, bells chime
and I weep
during the final movement
of a splendid Mahler symphony.