The threat of being cut is constant. You are immersed in it
even when the swather isn’t near. It would prune the skin on your fingers
if you had skin, had fingers, if you could linger
in a bath for too long. Instead of bathwater, the memory
of prior mowing, the fear that when you surpass
a certain height or grow a panicle of any kind, you will be shorn,
made fodder. It gets inside the grammar
of what makes you grass, leaves a chemical mark
on your genes, though this isn’t perceivable,
not on a cellular level. You aren’t changed so much
as you pass the change on, epigenetically, to the blades
and rhizomes of new grass. Are they your children
or an extension of you? Tell me there is a difference.
Tell me that when I plucked you verbless from the rest,
fit you between my thumbs and blew, vibrating
the piece of your body pressed there, that it was not me
whistling, but you singing, you were singing.