LAWN, REVISITED
Everyone’s decided to remodel.
Past three orange dumpsters parked
at the curb, one house is mid-facelift
(new windows, paint job, glossy front door)
while another’s backside is being built up,
Tyvek covering the yard’s sunny slope.
Easier and easier, it seems, to make
a cosmetic change, to delight in paint
chips and trimmings and newly-hewn
2x4s. Easy to covet a fresh frame, not
watch as trees are felled
and pumped full of preservatives.
Botox comes from bacteria: botulism,
a sausage that slew six in Wildbad,
then developed as a weapon in World War II.
2x4s were once coniferous firs
(Loblolly in the South, Douglas in the West)
known on construction sites as Spruce-Pine-Fir, or
SPF: same as the sunscreen I slather
on my face, terrified by the implication of wrinkles.
There’s a dick joke in here somewhere,
or a joke about frailty or gluttony, or maybe just
sadness between wallpaper and wordplay.
Of what? I ask the lawn’s little sign—
be respectful, no peeing—but still
we scuttle, my canine and I,
to the street’s other side. Yes, I feel guilty
about owning a dog, not knowing
the difference between captivity
and belonging. What would I do
if I did as I pleased? What would she do
if she did as she pleased?
When we run together through the woods,
she dives through the undergrowth,
chasing wild turkeys and rabbits and squirrels
not because she needs to eat one,
but because she’s been bred to chase
the things she wants.
Sometimes I hate the urge to create,
hate that it’s taken ownership
to teach me about loving
a species outside of myself, verity
of a language of head tilts and stances,
where a lowered tail means I’m scared
and there is no tense for the future.
KATHERINE JAMES is a writer, maker, and musician from rural Virginia. Her writing has appeared in Architectural Digest, Pleiades, Fifty Grande, The Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere.
