Knee Deep

Zoysia, oh Zoysia, where has your blazing grass gone? It's gone to Hell in a handbasket, that is where it has gone, as our entire neighborhood appeared to be on the verge of burning to the ground amidst leaf fires, lawn fires, and blazing golf shots gone mad. Yet, a force greater than grass is bringing Heat of a different kind.

In November, the street I grew up on turned into a corridor of fire as leaf fires lined the curbs and sirens could be heard across the city. Amidst the chaos of smoke and flames, my brother finds a new method for spreading our blackening zoysia grass to every lawn in our neighborhood.

As smoke trails rise above the fire pits in the Fall, neighborhood used to be filled not only with lit pumpkins but raked leaf piles burning iin the street. Our family had another take of fire, and one that involved The Zoysia, the super-grass of all lawn grasses.

You've got your Lone Ranger Suit on and headed through the last vestiges of the neighbors innocent begonias, greaniums and zinnias that have blossomed through another glorious summer. The flowers bend over, leaning towards the sound of sinister organ music down at the neighbor's house. It's a pale Halloween night, and their fate is hanging on the ominous arrival of Frost Itself.

Some things never change in spite of what the world is doing out there in the wild. Wars, like the one in the Middle East, will unfold before our eyes as landscapes are bulldozed with violence. Is it really survival of the fittest or is there some fresh air that can breathe new life into our wilderness hike?

Poems take license to transcend those kinds of endearing moments, to use our language in ways that our prose is not well suited. How do you write about your experiences such

that you feel your grandfather standing next to you, or you see yourself playing Kick-the-Can in the front yard again? A poem might do that. They are fragments and flashes of a larger history we are trying to put together, still, as the motorcade of life passes by.

What we call safety is only another name for holding onto what's close. Our pond ecosystem is constantly changing, and the changes are what makes the pond a steady habitat for the frogs living there. Sometimes, we work so hard at being safe and knowing the future, we trade in a kind of safety for the very pond we need for our survival. Our leap of faith isn't too far off from that of our aquatic friends.

They say you can choose your friends but you can't choose your family. A lot of people have left me out of either category because, admittedly, I don't care for sushi. I just can't acquire a taste for the stuff. Is there some ancient wisdom inside each circle, like rings in a tree that foretold the day each one of us would meet our destiny? Is there something medicinal in that sticky-ish texture, the Elmer’s glue that holds them together? Just like politics and religion, sushi is a touchy subject in our family, but I'm following my gut on this one.

Neither my mother or my father were the screaming types around our house when I grew up. They had cause to be, as we kids were handfuls. Like all children we took our parents to the bursting point at times, and their faces turned into a likeness of Edvard Munch' masterpiece, "The Scream." Could we all be reflections of our parents silent anxieties? Or could it be that we are the masterpieces that rise out of our howling, swirling, twirling lives?