My Grandmother’s Lawn

Those swans in your lawn
Do they ever swim?

Because they sit by your front steps
wearing old grass stains on their breasts
and their eyes carry elegance
in their masked reckoning.
Your lawn
is my littered mind
and your lawn
is your gnawing heart
sinking in towering dandelion grass.
I remember that black maine coon—
she wore a beautiful sable coat
and stunned me with emery irises.
She rested beneath the shade
of my grandmother’s fragrant rhododendrons
and before they took her away
the beldam lost her mind.

And she said,
so long sad world