On Grass

He woke up obsessed with grass. Perhaps not an obsession, but rather a thought bobbing in the distance, that he would see and then not see when it sank behind the roll of his morning routine. He saw it again when he sat down to the quiet of his Journal. Grass, he wrote. And the word had seemed oddly green on the page. He saw himself a boy, low in the thick of a lawn grown high between weekend cuttings, parting the blades and searching for beetles and the continued march of ants having left the sidewalk. The shoots are pale where they enter the earth, moist and littered with an odd fuzz of something like bits of string. It makes him think of ferns, the floor of a forest, and he imagines the ants he has yet to find, how they see the grass, like the towering redwood trees he has seen in magazines, beside which even automobiles appear themselves like ants. And beneath the stars, he sees the redwood trees like ants and wonders what beyond that is larger still. He scratches at the earth. His nails fill with the black of it. Would grass grow there, he wonders, and green fire bursts from his fingertips. He lays on his back, closes his eyes. He itches. The sun is better than any blanket he can remember, and he has known many wonderful blankets. The grass grows taller in the space between his arms and body, between the V of his legs, alongside his ears. Taller and taller until he is lost like a coin in its height, a penknife. At his back, roots grow, pale and searching for purchase. He is dirt, pierced by blades of grass, like a man dropped onto a bed of nails. And then, it is Saturday. He hears the whir of the mower. Sees his father’s long strides and in the air, smells all that is summer and what is best of a boy.