Grass   I tell myself I’m farming — who’s to say I’m not? My crop is meditations: on blood-borne memories of scything the hay in County Cork . . . on wasted labor . . . on the void, fruitless expenditure of time . . . on summer’s exuberant duties . . . on the seventh-day semiotics of trim, orderly boundaries, nature at bay . . . on the ordeals of beauty, beer-tempered heat and bugs and weeds and choices and the meaning of the slow, soft encroachment of night. But I’m no farmer — I’m a fireman, beating my righteous blades against this quiet green inferno that burns at the speed of light.     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont May 2017