Get a Job

Abstract

Get a Job Charles Wright (bio) 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. [End Page 167] Charles Wright Charles Wright grew up in Oak Ridge and Kingsport, Tennessee, and went on to a distinguished academic career primarily at the University of Virginia. He won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1998 for Black Zodiac and the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music/Selected Early Poems. Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois