The Water Pipe Breaks Before the Party

I’ve dug out the topsoil and spade though the heavy clay
so now five kinds and color of earth are piled all around—
dense wet chunks, light and ashy dust, brown clumps,
black rocks, spirals of creamy, caramel looking sand.

The irony has not escaped me that today, my thirtieth birthday,
I am in a hole. This day that so many said so seriously
would be the threshold to pain, responsibility, burden,
balding, and obesity—the things of growing old.

I think I am the metaphor, the man in the pit,
dug by my own two hands and tools. I think of
digging forever, down through the flowerbed
and the lava rock and the fire of the earth.

I think of returning to dust, from where I came.