PULLING PIPE

PULLING PIPE

Trouble down the well

and me, my dad, and my brothers
are Texas roughnecks
pulling spinning and stacking pipe
pipe and rod and “Careful dammit!
If you drop that rod the well is shot”

We’re Red Adair, fighting a fire
we’re wet and muddy and cold and mad
and we’ve got to get it done by dark

The gold down there’s not black but red
an iron rich sea hiding away
from the pulling power of the prairie sun

Looking back fifty years from a poet’s perch

I pull
spin and stack
metaphor and meaning

Back then it was just men
doing what they had to do
and white faced cattle waiting