Mowing

Sleepy and suburban at dusk, I learn again the yard’s geometry, edging around the garden and the weedy knots of flowers, circling trees and shrubs, giving a wide berth to the berry patch, heavy and sprawled out of its bounds. Shoving such a machine around a fairway of dandelions, it is easy to feel absurd. The average lawn, left alone one hundred years, could become a hardwood forest. An admirable project. Still I carry on, following week on week the same mowing pattern, cutting edges, almost sprinting the last narrow swaths. And tonight, as I mow over the bushels of fallen peaches, sending pits soaring over the neighbors’ fences, seems hardly any different. But on one crooked march I walk across the thin hidden hole to a yellowjacket hive. The blade pulls them up from their deep sweet chamber just as my bare legs go by. A bee lands heavily, all blunder and revenge, and the sting is a quick embrace and release, like the dared kid’s run and touch of a blind man. I’m blind now with the shock and pain of it, howling in a sprint toward the house, the mower flopped on its side, wild blade loose in the darkening air. Later, the motor sputtered quiet, starved by tilt, I’m back in the twilight, a half-dozen stings packed in wet tobacco, carrying a can of gasoline, a five-foot torch. The destruction is easy: shove can slow to entranceway lip, pull back and light torch, use torch to tip can. One low whump and it’s over. A few flaming drones flutter out and fall. Stragglers, late returners, cruise wide circles around the ruins. In the cool September night they fly or die. In the morning I finish my chores. All the way to winter the blackened hole remains. On Christmas Eve a light late snow covers it and all the lawn’s other imperfections: crabgrass hummocks, high maple roots, the mushroom-laden fairy ring that defies obliteration and appears every spring more visible than ever. Standing in the window, the scent of pine powerful around me, the snap of wood undoing itself in the stove, I wonder at this thin and cold camouflage, falling, gradually falling over what has gone and grown before. And I hear that other rattle and report, that engine driven by another fire. I think of a gold that is sweet and unguent, a gold that is a blaze of years behind me. I hear wind in its regular passes blowing across the roof, feel in my legs a minute and icy tingling, as though I have stood too long in one place or made again another wrong step, as though the present itself were a kind of memory, coiled, waiting, dying to be seen from tomorrow.