Boundaries
For six years I’ve been eating into the lawn.
In the beginning, we triumphantly
pulled up the decking and dug
ourselves one neat flower bed
at the top corner of the garden.
I planted a camellia, two peonies,
a viburnum, hesperantha, verbena,
a rose. Each had enjoyed a little
space to stretch into; a scattering of cerinthe seeds gently softened the in-betweens.
Two summers in and everyone was at capacity;
meanwhile I had added plucky sedums and crocosmia,
whose sense of their own importance seemed so radically inflated.
By mid-July of the third year
the wild, passionate tangle of the
back corner of the garden taunted us,
a kind of hideous backwards mirror,
reflecting all that we were not.
Of course, you would not speak of it,
instead managing the lawn that sat
between us and them
with a kind of religious fervour,
its neatness only ever a counterpoint to the anarchy beyond.
Sometimes,
in the sweetest hours
of the early morning,
I would pad across it to stand
barefoot in that flowerbed,
bleeding from fresh thorn wounds and
shivering, gasping for breath
at the exquisite beauty of dewy webs and foliage,
working my toes deep into the roots of those rebellious shrubs,
imagining pressing my tear-dampened cheeks into their dark, rich soil.
It was on one of those mornings
that I found myself kneeling at the boundary,
poised above the threshold of your perfect lawn,
trowel in hand.
I had no sense of how I had arrived there.
I only nibbled that day, making the very gentlest
of transgressions into your astonishing carpet of green.
The thrill I felt told me I would do it again.
Before long the act was daily,
a ritual performed before sunrise or after dark.
I would offer my cover –
the need for a cutting from the herb box,
the collection of recycling in the garage,
the hunt for a cat or a hedgehog or a full moon –
remove my shoes, wriggle my toes into welcoming
earth and take another bite.
Always careful to follow the line
of the flowerbed, the boundary between
this and that,
gradually, methodically,
I carved away the outer reaches
of that precious grassland, inch by startled inch.
Throughout the spring and summer months I was committed;
as autumn dead-headed flowers
and cleared leaf cover
I slowed my progress,
determined not to give myself away,
only allowing an acceleration once
the tulips had thrown themselves wide the following spring.
Six summers in and we are spent.
We no longer speak of anything but the recycling and the cats.
On Tuesday you commented,
wonderingly,
on the disappearance of the lawn.
Such a curious phenomenon, you said.
I looked it up in a dictionary,
which told me that boundaries show where one thing ends
and another begins.
I am an actor and theatre-maker who has recently become very excited (again) by writing poetry. In the past six months I have found a nurturing and encouraging space to play in Frome's sell-out quarterly poetry event Dirty Laundry and its The Path workshops.