Cutting Grass, Creating Order

I heard this poem today on Keillor’s Writers’ Almanac, and by poem’s end, I was gleeful.  Not infrequently, I read a passage from a book or a poem, and I recognize experiences I’ve had, which I was either vaguely conscious or had never fully brought into conversation with others.  So often, simple and seemingly odd pleasures are never articulated.

Cutting grass, especially as adolescent was a badge of competency and maturity.  No longer were my parents fearful of me losing a foot (although I once foolishly stuck my hand in the exhaust of our Toro and slit the ends of my fingers).  Cutting grass was effort with tangible results.  So little of our lives now result in a concrete demonstration of work.

Here is one of my own unspoken pleasures.  A few years ago, we bought a hyper energy-efficient dishwasher.  The most efficient mode is the three-hour wash.  While it appears contradictory that it would be so efficient, it sprays water slowly, and produces a steady hum, the white noise of dusk.  It signals days end.  It signals a tiny kind of order that allows me to be assured that I will wake the next day with clean dishes.

A bed which has been made is far more inviting than one with sheets balled up and littered with books and clothing.  A weeded garden.  Clothes folded and stowed among the others I do not need.

Another from childhood.  Saturdays were cleaning day in my childhood.  By days end, our refrigerator was filled with food for the following week and the smell of ammonia wafted from the kitchen’s linoleum floor.  Saturday was the first day of the week, and by those actions, we could do what we had to do.

Cutting grass, too, has its own kind of satisfaction.  There is the smell, of course.  But it is the order.  Cutting grass is like an exercise is in efficiency.  It is working out the quadratic equation and plotting a graph that, when I learned the language of mathematics, was consistent, predictable, and ultimately a form of certainty.  

The narrator of the poem alludes to the “ever-diminishing square,” which worked in most of he lawns I’ve cut.  Then there are the irregular shapes.  The five-acre triangle of my mother’s cabin.  Behind my current house, neighbors took turns cutting the flood plain and ridge that, miraculously, has not been developed given we are three miles from downtown Atlanta, its shape defined by the steep hills, the bamboo grove, and, again, the creeping kudzu.

More often than not, yards are wasted, especially those that are set so far back from the street, that to occupy them, you might be mistaken for a lonely, old grubber desperately needing conversation.  There, few children play.  The action is for the backyard: vegetable gardens, barbecues, Wiffle ball, and various forms of excess and illegality.

I no longer have grass to cut.  Oaks eighty-feet tall in my backyard, creates shad that only allows English Ivy and the pernicious Kudzu.  The front yard, most of which is shaded since we moved here in 1994, is covered in shad-loving plants enclosed in stone islands, and in between are mulched walkways.

P.S.  I received a number of responses from my last posting.  I encourage your to sing up for my blog and post your own unarticulated satisfaction.  

                             http://pencilgrub.blogspot.com/

Tamed  by George Bilgere

This summer my nephew
is old enough for his first job:
mowing the lawn.

I watch him lean his skinny chest
to the bar of the pushmower,
put his weight into it, and become,

for the first time, a beast in harness,
a laborer on the face of the earth,
somehow withering and expanding at the same time

into something worn and ancient, but still
a kid withal. And I remember
how bitterly I went into the traces,

hating that Saturday ritual
for a while, then growing inexplicably
into it, gradually mastering

the topography of the yard,
sometimes using the back and forth technique,
sometimes going for the checkerboard effect,

or my favorite, the ever-diminishing square
that left, at the lawn's center, one
last uncut stand of grass, a wild fortress

I annihilated with a strange thrill,
then stood back to take a look--
to survey the field. To cast

a critical eye on my work.
Just as this kid is doing, standing
at the edge of the mowed clearance.

Taking his own measure. And liking it.

Two Ted Kooser Highway Poems

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted.  Negligence in reading and writing is self-perpetuating.  But weeds need to be pulled.  Boys need to graduate from high school.  Cedar planking needs to be stained.  And of course, there is poker.

Below are two poems by Ted Kooser.  I’ve read a smattering of his work but never read a complete volume.  Comments to follow.

Highway 30  by Ted Kooser

At two in the morning, when the moon
has driven away,
leaving the faint taillight of one star
at the horizon, a light
like moonlight leaks
from broken crates that lie fallen
along the highway, becoming
motels, all-night cafes, and bus stations
with greenhouse windows,
where lone women sit like overturned flowerpots,
crushing the soft, gray petals of old coats.

The “logic,” as I would like to refer to it, of images in these poems is often befuddling.  I think “What does that mean?” and then continue on.  Part of my attraction is based upon the landscape, which is one I am familiar.  Growing up in the Midwest, I often flew through the prairie, the flat farms with grazing cows, sorghum, soybean, and corn.  It is the place that for many is nothing.  

And at the gas stations and cafes, which my ministerial Grandfather R.G. pronounced, “cuhfay,” were the poorly cleaned bathroom with the roll of cloth towels that mysteriously came and exited through the white box mounted on the wall.  No sixteen ounce cans of green tea, CDs, and riblet sandwiches.  More likely, a tube of baloney, an eight-ounce Coke, Dentyne, and road maps.

The roads I remember were no less desolate, no less lonely than today, but they were different.  I recently drove from Atlanta to Des Moines.  In northern Missouri and southeastern Iowa, that desolation still exists.  The port of safety was Hardees and the sterile Rest Stops along four-lane, divided highway. 

But reading poems like this forces me to rethink the way I see, to accept what is, if only temporarily.  It’s like the heat of this triple digit day. The heat must be my friend or my enemy.

Here’s another Kooser poem.

So This is Nebraska  by Ted Kooser

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.

On either side, those dear old ladies,
the loosening barns, their little windows
dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs
hide broken tractors under their skirts.

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting on every post.

Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,
top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,
a pickup kicks its fenders off
and settles back to read the clouds.

You feel like that; you feel like letting
your tires go flat, like letting the mice
build a nest in your muffler, like being
no more than a truck in the weeds,

clucking with chickens or sticky with honey
or holding a skinny old man in your lap
while he watches the road, waiting
for someone to wave to. You feel like

waving. You feel like stopping the car
and dancing around on the road. You wave
instead and leave your hand out gliding
larklike over the wheat, over the houses.

Here, to a greater extent, are some startling images that give me some hope for finding awe in the common, the mundane.

Consider

 “... the sparks of redwing blackbirds.”  I like that one.  The birds are on fire.  Alive.  It’s the kind of image that redefines the commonplace, as in Hopkins poem, “God’s Grandeur,” in which he writes, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.   It will flame out, like shining from shook foil...:

And what exactly is “dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs?”  The eyes of “dear old ladies” or the barn’s windows?  Does it matter?  The rage for certainty in some poems is pointless.

What a surprise to discover the a “shelterbelt,” is not of Kooser’s invention, but a word commonly used by farmers to describe a planting of trees between fields to slow the wind down and minimize erosion and crop damage.

Hollyhocks?  So long its been since they grew in our yard.  But the oaks on my street have grown so high that parts of my postage-stamp front yard get no sunlight.

I know well how cars and trucks lie in barnyards. The farm of my childhood, was a litter of rusted steel..  My maternal grandfather, John Dzurick, had a Model A parked next to the outhouse.  There was a butte of oil cans, give-gallon lard tubs, and rippled galvanized roofing.

Flights of Fancy

The poem below reminds me of my own flying thoughts.  For a multitude of reasons, I dislike the entire experience.  Arriving early.  Security is like cattle roaming through a maze to be slaughtered into Happy Meals.  And on the way, anxious thoughts like, “Did I forget to remove my Swiss Army Knife out of my bag?  Will they lose my baggage?  Where is my ticket?”

It’s a tawdry affair.  Chirping “flight attendants.”  Sitting far too close to strangers, especially those who want to engage me in intimate conversation which ultimately descends into banality.  Stingy portions of peanuts and soft drinks.  Threadbare seats whose foam padding has been scrunched to the density of plywood.

But upon occasion, I arrive at the airport, armed with a few selected magazines and a book, one book that so rarely sucks me in, say In Cold Blood.  I arrive after a night’s restful sleep.  Speed through the line without incident.  The seat next to me is empty.  The flight attendant doesn’t recognize that my seat is slightly reclined.  And were off on a four-hour flight to the West Coast.  

I read.  I nap.  My mind wanders into places where, if I am both aware and able to admit it, I find deep contentment.  And these thoughts, I seldom articulate, for fear of boring others or inciting derision.  .  

The beauty of long trips alone is that there are few distractions.  This poem celebrates the inner life, the places our minds wander to thoughts of which we are barely cognizant. 

After reading it, I was catapulted to 1988.  Under the guidance of a gawky professor who wore shirts too small, whose ties were garish, and whose beard often was inhabited by bits of lint, I read James Joyce’s Ulysses.  

 It was a reading experience I had never had before because it thrust me from the realm of realism.  And it was a long novel, a complex novel, one that demanded rereading.  It is a book that might be more apt to say requires study over a lifetime.  

Like other Modernists, he used interior monologue.  I think of it as both a technique as well as the subject, itself, of the novel.  It occurs in Dublin on June 16, 1904, is interior monologue.  Past, present, and future all meld in the mind.  Flights of fancy, what could be, and what never was become real. 

And in this poem, the narrator considers the hereafter.  She considers, she creates the lives of varied souls, and her own yearning for something better.  

Meditation from 14A  by Jennifer Maier

And what if the passage out of this life
is like a flight from Seattle to St. Louis--

the long taxi out of the body, the brief
and terrible acceleration, the improbable

buoyancy, and then the moment when,
godlike, you see the way things fit

together: the grave and earnest roads
with their little cars, stitching their desires

with invisible thread; the tiny pushpin houses
and backyard swimming pools, dreaming

the same blue dream. And who but the dead
may look down with impunity on these white

birds, strewn like dice above the river whose name
you have forgotten, though you know,

having crossed the Divide, that it flows
east now, toward the vast, still heartland,

its pinstriped remnants of wheat and corn
laid out like burial clothes. And how

you would like to close your eyes, if only
you could stop thinking about that small scratch
   
on the window, more of a pinprick, really,
and about yourself sucked out! anatomized!--

part of you now (the best part) a molecule
of pure oxygen, breathed in by the farmer

on his tractor; by the frightened rabbit
in the ditch; by a child riding a bike

in Topeka; by the sad wife of a Mexican
diplomat; by a dog, digging up a bone

a hundred years in the future, that foreign city
where you don't know a soul, but where you think

you could start over, could make a whole
new life for yourself, and will.


"Meditation from 14A" by Jennifer Maier, from Dark Alphabet. (c) Southern Illinois University Press, 2006.