The Man into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball -- Thomas Lux

(Poem #1407) The Man into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball each day mowed and mowed his lawn, his dry quarter-acre, the machine slicing a wisp from each blade's tip. Dust storms rose around the roar, 6 p.m. every day, spring, summer, fall. If he could mow the snow he would. On one side, his neighbors the cows turned their backs to him and did what they do to the grass. Where he worked, I don't know, but it set his jaw to: tight. His wife a cipher, shoebox tissue, a shattered apron. As if into her head he drove a wedge of shale. Years later, his daughter goes to jail. Mow, mow, mow his lawn gently down a decade's summers. On his other side lived mine and me, across a narrow pasture, often fallow -- a field of fly balls, the best part of childhood and baseball. But if a ball crossed his line, as one did in 1956, and another in 1958, it came back coleslaw -- his lawnmower ate it up, happy to cut something, no matter what the manual said about foreign objects, stones, or sticks. -- Thomas Lux

From the minute I read the title of today's poem, I knew I was going to
enjoy it. "The Man into whose Yard you Should Not Hit Your Ball" - what
child has not known one? It conjures up an instant image, an entire
personality type summed in one short line.

Nor did the rest of the poem disappoint. Despite a certain (unavoidable)
predictability, I was captivated by the charm of the language, the
almost-stream of conscious narrative tone, and above all, the sheer
observation that sparkled in every line. I think my favourite touch was the
"one did in 1956/ and another in 1958" - the incidents, probably no more
than passing nuisances in the man's life, stamped indelibly across the
narrator's boyhood and looming large in memory.

Nicely wrapped up poem, too - when I read these stream-of-consciousness
poems I always hold my breath a little, wondering if the poet will be up to
the task of supplying an ending that both flows with and definitively closes
the poem. Fortunately, Lux was, and the finished whole stands as a very
satisfying experience.

martin

Biography:
  [broken link] http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=116

Poem in Thanks -- Thomas Lux

Guest poem submitted by Sashidhar Dandamudi:

(Poem #1305) Poem in Thanks Lord Whoever, thank you for this air I'm about to in- and exhale, this hutch in the woods, the wood for fire, the light-both lamp and the natural stuff of leaf-back, fern, and wing. For the piano, the shovel for ashes, the moth-gnawed blankets, the stone-cold water stone-cold: thank you. Thank you, Lord, coming for to carry me here -- where I'll gnash it out, Lord, where I'll calm and work, Lord, thank you for the goddamn birds singing! -- Thomas Lux

This poem opens Garrison Keillor's (the funny guy who reads poems on NPR
and of course hosts "The Praire Home Companion") anthology 'Good Poems'.
The section is called "O Lord!".

In the preface of this book, Keillor says these poems were chosen for
"their wit, their frankness, their passion and their utter clarity in
the face of everything else a person has to deal with at 7 a.m." He also
goes on say that  "For writers, it's enough to refer to somebody having
written a good poem. Somebody else can worry about greatness."

I concur wholly with Keillor's view for this indeed is a good poem. And
which I have, since I have read it, passed on to other friends and
remembered it on early mornings when I heard "the goddamn birds
singing".

Also since I personally know Thomas Lux, I would like to share this poem
with other Ministrel-ites, as an introduction to a body of work by a
deligthful poet and person.

Thank you.
Sashi.

Bio:

THOMAS LUX, born in Northampton, Massachusettes in 1946, is a member of
the writing faculty and director of the MFA Program in Poetry at Sarah
Lawrence College. In recent years he has been on the graduate faculties
of Boston University, the University of California (Irvine), Columbia
University, Warren Wilson College, and the Universities of Houston,
Iowa, and Michigan. A former Guggenheim Fellow, the recipient of three
NEA grants, Lux won the Kingsley Tufts Award for his book of poems,
Split Horizon, and has been a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times
Book Award in poetry and the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.