each day mowed <br />and mowed his lawn, his dry quarter acre, <br />the machine slicing a wisp <br />from each blade's tip. Dust storms rose <br />around the roar: 6:00 P.M., every day, <br />spring, summer, fall. If he could mow <br />the snow he would. <br />On one side, his neighbors the cows <br />turned their backs to him <br />and did what they do to the grass. <br />Where he worked, I don't know <br />but it sets his jaw to: tight. <br />His wife a cipher, shoebox tissue, <br />a shattered apron. As if <br />into her head he drove a wedge of shale. <br />Years later his daughter goes to jail. <br /> <br />Mow, mow, mow his lawn <br />gently down a decade's summers. <br />On his other side lived mine and me, <br />across a narrow pasture, often fallow; <br />a field of fly balls, the best part of childhood <br />and baseball, but one could not cross his line <br />and if it did, <br />as one did in 1956 <br />and another in 1958, <br />it came back coleslaw -- his lawn mower <br />ate it up, happy <br />to cut something, no matter <br />what the manual said <br />about foreign objects, <br />stones, or sticks.<br /><br />Thomas Lux<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-man-into-whose-yard-you-should-not-hit-your/
