Mowing

by John Kinsella

It’s a rev thing this ingenu
contemplates as his bum vibrates
and ball-sack shakes, whipping
his sperm to a cream or frenzy,
or wiping out the last ones—
those missed by the herbicides
he dumps on the firebreaks.
It’s hard to revel in winter greenery
chopped to an herby piquancy,
to feel a renewal come out of the red dirt
you know it disguises; strap-on, ride-on flirt,
he skirts fruit trees bare as the nudity
that takes him to the refrigerator
when the rest of the house sleeps,
his curvaceous paddocks close and smooth,
velvet on a flawed skin rising up
to meet him with every thrust.

 

John Kinsella’s latest book of poetry is Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems (Norton, 2003), selected and introduced by Harold Bloom. He is a professor of English at Kenyon College and a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University. (4/2004)