Uncle Elwood, By SIDNEY L. HALL, JR.

With Y-shaped wood,

Always a twisted,

Weathered Y,

Uncle Elwood

Is showing us how to dowse.

It’s Saturday.

My father horsing around again,

Playing the skeptic,

Maybe to get a taste of

What he could never be.

We watch the stick

Ride, and finally tremble,

And point down,

Like a young man looking

into his young wife’s eyes.

Under a green

Clump of grass, studded

With angular stones,

A mysterious vein pulses

With water, and keeps

the earth alive.

While we all try to imagine it,

My father runs down to the

cellar and turns the underground

pipes off and on, and

We call down to him.

Uncle Elwood gets it every time.

My father proves

Even to his own children

Who won’t believe,

That there are more things

In heaven and under earth, and that

Even an old man whose pants

are too short, and whose

buttoned collar squeezes too much

Color into his aged face,

Even this old man, if he

Has practiced his art and

Has the right shape of Y,

Can find the water every time.

Sidney Hall is a poet who lives, writes and gardens in New Hampshire. 1992 by Sidney Hall. Reprinted by permission.