In Bali, it’s the filing of the canines
to limit boys’ wild adolescence.
Among Cameroon’s Baka Pygmies
it’s the Spirit of the Forest killing

boys to be reborn as men. And in rural
Illinois, 1964, the May grass green,
resilient as Astro Turf, it’s initiation
for the fraternity of boys-who-mow.

My turn now to untangle the Craftsman
from the rakes and bikes, top it off
with the dregs of last year’s gasoline,
find my chest exceeds the handles,

but I can barely pull the cord. It takes
twenty tugs, more and less throttle,
more and less choke, for the engine
to catch, cough, and wreathe me in its

blue-black smoke. Then maneuvering
the sidewalk is easy, dried leaves
and spring debris parting as I push.
But once I clear the pavement, bounce

down into that first of countless rounds,
I become a summer Sisyphus, mini-
supplicant leaning into the pleasure
of some sadistic god. Luckily it’s

post-Ike, post-JFK, so the power-push
is soon supplanted by the self-propelled,
the Wheel Horse rider. Slow-forward
eight years, parents away on vacation,

and I take to trick-driving in third gear,
careening in circles, graduate at my
County job to Farmall tractors, tires
taller than fence posts, brush hogs whose

twin two-foot blades mangle anything
along a country road.  One breezy day
in May, I find where Midwest rabbits nest—
in the green shade of a fencerow crabapple,

invisible in the long grass eight feet
away from the shoulder. And once I’ve run
the lowered mower over them, glanced
back to see a dozen brown and blue-red

bodies roiling behind the roar, I mimic
how other men can keep on mowing.

I’m glad we have this chance to chat, now,
before my parents move in
for the rest of their lives.
There are things you need to know.

Frankly, they may not be easy
to get along with. Toast, for example,
the making of it, you see, for some reason
very important—how brown, how hot,
just when.
Essential things like that.

Remembering past trips, too,
can be irritating,
the details—which hotel,
in Warsaw, for God’s sake,
where they first heard my sister
would divorce her first husband,
and just where that great Dutch
cheese place was, there,
in the mauve photo album,
a few pages after me in a tux,
the wedding.

They will tell you how they miss
all those rooms
in the house where they lived
for forty years this Wednesday,
coincidentally, my mother’s
eighty-first birthday.

And whenever your ‘foreign’ gardeners
mow and trim the prim edges
of this emerald lawn
my parents will tell you how they dream
about their yard—all that grass,
the matured maples, the hedge of lilacs
defining the lot line out back.

You also need to know that you
were not their first choice.
They wanted the model
with the sunroom like their porch, to be
closer to the clubhouse, the workshop.
But they were told that could take
another couple of years, 
maybe three or four or more,
and, as Mom puts it,
at this point they can’t gamble,
what with Dad likely going
totally blind at any time,
and her just not able
to be their eyes and legs, both,
here, in a whole new place.