June MMXXII
It’s June. The mowers, gasoline and electric, have been mustered, in martial or late vernal configuration, mowing down serpentine or spiraled patterns, clockwise, anticlockwise, adjusting for topography, for individual preference, adjusting for the coeruleus effect. A great bovine reek of castoff clippings perfumes the lanes, the highways and the byways, perfumes the boulevards and throughfares, striking deep into the metropole, recalling pasturage and croft, with notes of sulfurous particulate overtop, a little brimstone in this peaceable kingdom. The mowers mow; they sheer and crop; they do it mechanically, not biomechanically, without gastroliths or segmented guts, without all that fermenting daylong mastication, those particular pleasures denied humankind, driven as we are from the garden into the gardening, though a beer or a lemonade might palliate the perennial curse of labor; it just might.
In mists and sprays, in broadcast pellets, various herbicides and pesticides are dispersed, this also, very literally, recalling various martial feats, various martial crimes. It’s all the same chemicals more or less. Verminous bugs, parasitizers, competitors, fall; pollinators fall also, insect and insectivore, native and introduced verdure, desiccated, waiting to be clipped and bagged, mixed with sewage, then resold for compost; the circle of urban suburban life completes and continues, or it turns about, reverses, cul-de-sac, in a roundabout fashion, towards another round of water rationing. It’s like some old narrated war letter—posted, received, rewritten, reposted, broadcast—exchanged with poignant variations, from front to home front and back, turnabout. Those emerald pastoral patches, my dearest, I sadly relate to you, will brown and desiccate as the season advances, as the wells run dry, grass the color of thatch, the color of fodder, until the rains come again, sort of, maybe, once faithful, now capricious, I sadly relate. We move from the garden into the gardening, my dearest, landscaping in a parched landscape, with some beer or lemonade, maybe, to quench a momentary thirst, that being not enough though, not nearly enough, compared to you, sweet rain.
