Once upon a time, I read that the perfect age for writing quality poetry is twenty-three. Apparently most of T.S. Elliot’s stuff came out then, the rest having to do with prose. I realized January 19ththat I will turn twenty-four in three months, and since I started writing some poems before it’s too late: forty-six poems at twenty-three. I’ll post each Friday until the last week of March, then I’ll post one a day until my birthday on April 30th. Here’s number 7:

Seven years since last I smelled grass
Fresh-cut, trimmed, bleeding photosynthesis
All over soil, like green martian life
Well, certainly not Martian.
Their surface looks fairly red, and ours looks
Yellowed at best when dead.

Seven years since I put my hand to a mower
From dorm to Dearborn to dorm to Diego to dorm to
Apartment of nine boys
(Yes, nine.)
to duplex, to one decrepit old character-filled house to live out my dotage

Before then, I remember soaking pathetic sneakers in crawdad-holes
Charging hills with the kind you push, with the pull-start
Assuming, even at sixteen, that I was some commander
Was it not, after all, a field full of blades?

Before then, I remember riding on some old vessel my dad
Bartered over when his kind demeanor gave way to wit
Assuming, even at fourteen, that I was some captain
Steering my ship on the currents of what other, greater men called “waves”, which I shall not deal with presently, since the
Barn swallows darted over and beyond me head
F-16s dive-bombing me away from the homeland
(True story.)
My captain’s-training urging me to remind myself:
They’re mere gulls who want fish from my wake.

Before then, I remember hearing about kids getting their arms
savaged off in gross mangles of steel, flesh, bone, about how
not to touch a machine, how not to
fling rocks at cars, or
chase our neighbor’s cat with sharp objects

Seven years, but fresh cut grass sings a summer’s song
Summers gone
Summers to come, a
Summer goddess’ perfume sprayed over the earth the day before
I turn old again.