Pastoral Ode to the Drainage Ditch

By David Anson Lee

Not river, not creek - give the ditch its due,

that narrow cut behind the grocery store 

where summer storms leave bottle caps, a shoe, 

milkweed, a glove, receipts along the shore.

Here dragonflies patrol the cattail fringe. 

A sparrow drinks beside a plastic tie. 

The culvert takes the parking lot's orange tinge 

and carries it beneath the passing sky.

After a storm, the ditch becomes a glass 

in which one cloud lies trembling under cars. 

A broken branch goes by. Two minnows pass. 

The evening opens slowly into stars.

By August, frogs have filled the muddy seam. 

Their voices rise beneath the sodium glare. 

No shepherd leads them. Still, they keep the green 

alive beneath the asphalt's vacant air.

And when the subdivision lights come on, 

the ditch goes dark, but does not disappear; 

it keeps the rain the paved world has forgotten, 

and gives it back as frogs we almost hear.

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David Anson Lee is a poet whose work explores memory, mortality, place, and the strange emotional lives of ordinary things. His poems have appeared in The Rush Magazine, Plainsongs, New Contrast, Still Point Arts Quarterly, and other literary journals. His debut chapbook, The Body Keeps Its Inventory in Shadow, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books. He lives in Houston, Texas, where he writes and works in medicine.