My Freedom Lawn

“A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full
hands…
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition…”
-Walt Whitman


is full of chickweed and wild violets
the way a child’s mind is full of games.
I say to my neighbors, Let’s play hide
and seek or roller bat sometime,
but all I get are sighs and headshakes,
their leashed dogs pulling nervously
past the waist-high wilderness
that surrounds our house.
To think that a blend of fescue
and rye, unmowed and unedged, says something
definable about the self
is a riddle I answer to suit myself.
To think that a plot of lawn grass
is “me” to neighbors is more than I hoped for.
I give my yard its freedom as a father
gives a child a box of crayons and paper,
hoping its imagination will discover
Eden.
The lawn is not the glacier nor the ocean
that once covered the ground here
with their secrets.
The self is not a green pasture to lie
down in nor a graveyard of unmarked regrets.
You can’t step in the same lawn twice,
or so they say.
If my neighbors erect molded concrete yard art
and birdhouses, must I do the same?
What would it be like to find a satyr
in every blackberry thicket,
a wood nymph behind every kudzu leaf?