Years ago, I had the occasion to meet the poet Douglas Dunn at a poetry reading. I was reminded of this encounter this afternoon by a quirky series of events.
We have our lawns cut by a gardening company. Not because we are lazy (OK, maybe a bit), but because we don’t trust ourselves with the kind of equipment that is required to cut lawns on death defying slopes. The contractors have to use a strimmer for the entire property, such is the incline. Anything heavier, and gravity would drag them to the bottom of the valley.
Each week a different young man shows up, and when he’s finished, he drops the bill into our letterbox. Today my husband remarked that the chap who did the lawns today looked remarkably sleepy/hungover, so it didn’t surprise him that he forgot to leave the bill. I quipped that maybe he didn’t just cut grass but smoked it too.
Later in the afternoon, I noticed that one small area of garden which has grown it’s own lawn (and is flat) had been neatly trimmed and the massive poppies which also grow there had been carefully avoided and thus preserved. When I told my husband that the gardener had left the poppies standing he quipped “Oh, he’ll be coming back for them later”.
The link with Douglas Dunn is from his Terry Street poems. The last line of “A Removal from Terry Street” developed a double entendre in the 1960s when it was written.
On a squeaking cart, they push the usual stuff,
A mattress, bed ends, cups, carpets, chairs,
Four paperback westerns. Two whistling youths
In surplus U S Army battle-jackets
Remove their sister’s goods. Her husband
Follows, carrying on his shoulders the son
Whose mischief we are glad to see removed,
And pushing, of all things, a lawnmower.
There is no grass in Terry Street. The worms
Come up cracks in concrete yards in moonlight.That man, I wish him well. I wish him grass.
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