Neighboring

Each week, for his spreading plot of couch grass
and ungirdled shrubs, hem of his lawn about
to wander past the too-tufted hedges
of honeysuckle and buckthorn, my neighbor
trusts the employees from "Landscaping and Muscles
For Hire" to arrive on time and raucously
set right his lands: six men seen from my window
blowing the good form through.  It's their work to pick
and choose.  Though each flower is blue-eyed, they're paid
to sow a pricey hoof-and-horn-meal mixture
into the iris bed, but take an hour
to weed-eat all the wild skullcaps from the yard's edge.

Needless to say, there's no hope for a sprout
of alien yellow mushroom coming up,
stalwart, for the wet season, though the surfaces
of things keep trundling out to spoil the imagined,
the ideal.  Forwning a bit at the lilac,
badly spindled, the smallest of these workers
lifts his hands into the air, foisting clippers,
a black X, over the about-to-be-pinched-back boxwood.
Later, water from their labors streaming
through groundcover, staining the sidewalk caramel,
coffee, and rust, the men sit down in the symmetry
of cut grass and trimmed privet for their lunch,
a chance to dip into undulant
puddles of a cinnamon-scented stew
I've never tasted.  Beside them is my
own stretch of dirt, the grass allowed to grow--
or not-- in the sand-patched soil, a randomness
resembling a boy's first attempt at a beard,
that stubbled cheek.  Meanwhile, my neighbor's
oak roots insist on running over my driveway
roughshod, crazing the pale grey cement
to hugger mugger a jumbled heap, out of order.
Reversing, soon the truck will bounce back down it.
We're so safe from each other, we never speak.

                                                                     --Pimone Triplett


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