Time With My Dogs (In Conjunction with The Matter of Time)

I’m sitting in the lawn of the house I grew up in. Belongs to West Point, but since I lived here all my life I feel like it belongs to me. The grass is uncut, a little longer than it should be, dandelions throughout, and I can see off to the side of the house the lawn mower my Dad said was broken last summer. It still looks rusted and outdated, brown where it should be red. I used to want one of those lawn mowers you can ride on, but right now, the weather is so nice, I’d be just fine pushing a lawn mower back and forth across the yard, even the steep hill on the side, that when I always push the mower up it feels as if I might fall backwards at any moment, due to the steepness, and the mower would devour me. Head to toe like passing through a wormhole. That happened to a kid I knew in High School. Lost a whole hand to a mower. The sound of a twig passing through the blades, the smell of fresh cut grass. The birds are singing, competing songs, with the insects.
The sun is as bright as I remember it being when I am in this yard. The grass is the deepest green I’ve ever seen. A solitary bird sings on a tree, about to blossom, standing ominously behind my house, higher than the unused antennae. The boulders that line my parent’s house are the same boulders I played on as a kid. Standing on those boulders in the past felt like I was standing on top of a mountain, maybe even Earth. I was the best robot-cowboy-space-ninja around. That’s also because I had no neighbors, no competition, but that could also be because everyone knew I was the best robot-cowboy-space-ninja in town. I saved the world everyday back then, with just some frog armies, pockets full of stones, a sturdy twig or two, ancient bullet shells I found in the woods from the Revolutionary and Civil war, some bad words I heard my parents use, my imaginary skeleton horse, the box cutters I stole from the barn, oh and this great blowtorch kit… what I was bored… don’t judge me. So what if I fought off the redcoats and the confederates, and Super Shredder, and the Stay Puff man, and the evil ghosts of dead horses, and Nazis, Nazi Aliens, and Nazi Zombies, (I only went to Synagogue to kiss the rabbis daughter and watch MTV, and sneak some wine in), ok, you’re all safe now. If only you met me when I was a young Michael Jordan with rejuvenating laser basketballs, that could blow up entire planets…
My old dogs, an iguana, turtles, a snake, horses, and cats, are buried across the road, next to the stream. I let my dogs out of the house now and they always run over to the Pet Sematary, (just how Stephen King spells it) and sniff and pee on the old graves, the new dogs always pee on the graves of the dogs they replaced. They’re real assholes like that. It’s kind of a dick move, but that patch of limestone graves, is the most fertile piece of land with the greenest grass. I planted a bamboo tree over my Rottweiler just last spring, and it’s grown substantially since.
Down the road are bottomless lakes through the trees, with turtles sunbathing in them, like pin-up girls in one-pieces, blinded by aluminum sun catchers. Pin-up girls who soak in the rays like that will probably grow up, or have grown up, crawling out from the beach, with leathery skin, brown and tough, just like the turtles. I should introduce the two.
I hope when I’m gone someone else will appreciate this house just as I have, but the other half of me wants to buy it from West Point and keep it for myself, an impossible deal, so the other part of me would have to burn it down, but then yet another part needs to know it will always be occupied because it very well might jump right out of the Earth and retreat deeper into the woods, where it belongs, a stronghold or some citadel. And occupied by generals of course. It emerges from the hillside like any other boulder would, like it was assumed here by glaciers all those years ago. The sky is it’s biggest here. Fertile and blue.
This will always be my favorite place, more so even than an empty beach, or General Kosciuszko’s Garden in West Point, that even all the cadets have forgotten about, and I’m always the only person there, built in 1779. Sometimes I’ll compare my age with a rock, or the Civil War, or a fallen tree, I’ll count it’s rings, even though I didn’t pay attention in Environmental Class, I’m probably counting wrong, so lets just say everything’s an approximation.
Since I can’t cut the grass, and I just remembered I need a haircut, I’d like very much to build a rock wall. It has a particular meditating quality to it, which not many other things can bring me. I can’t say exactly how many I’ve built in my lifetime, but an approximation would be upwards in the 30’s. That spans many sizes and lengths of walls. I’ve made some only one foot high and three feet across, others five feet high, and fifty feet long. The kind of rock walls you could fight Civil Wars and Revolutionary Wars behind. Single shot rifles, heavy 1867 wood, the smell of gun powder, stale rations, my horse has been wounded by the enemy, how many have I killed, this rock wall is damp, and in it’s shade I’ll wait for my men, or whatever is left of them… Custer died, alongside his entire command. He’s buried further down the road.
Bugs are getting in my ears and hair. Just like they always do. I need a fucking haircut. To my left and to my right used to be two very large, very old trees, Both cut down by West Point, because they could’ve collapsed onto the house. They say it’s a Historical Landmark, and it is. With the trees gone, feels like I’ve lost both arms. I can’t say really how many times I’ve climbed each, or pretended each was a villain, or swung from a crude rope swing on them, but it’s probably a billion. Yea, definitely a billion. I’m rounding down too, to the most logical number I can think of. Benedict Arnold, a real motherfucker, spent a night in this house, so says the town Historian, through his coke bottle glasses, it was also part of the underground railroad, and there is a room, a room above the master bedroom, that in the 25 years my family has lived here, no one has ever been able to get into. Whatever passageway kept a secret, has been either completely forgotten, or sealed up. I once lassoed the chimney, to climb up to the windows of the secret room to look in, I almost fell at the sight of the ghostly vacancy within.
There are many ghosts here. Animal and human. They’ve all been really nice though, only scaring strangers. Guard Ghosts or Ghost Guards? It’s Guard Dog, not Dog Guard… A single strand of spider web has fallen across my brow. Now it’s attached to my hand. Now my shoe. When it rains a large face appears on the stone façade of the house. It looks most like Mickey Mouse’s silhouette, but giant, and judging. Nazi Mickey? Walt you bastard. Well there is no solid evidence saying you were a Nazi, but the face on the side of my parent’s house looks like the Mickey Mouse in the episode "The Wayward Canary," that used a cigarette lighter with a swastika on the side.
I have a halo of gnats and bees and the blades of grass begin to itch the bottom of my feet. I remember my childhood as one long day, and I’m sure I’ll eventually think of this day and the ones after it as part of that same day. In this immense seclusion, in this old lovely yard, I feel like one of the ghosts, letting the wind pass through me, my cavernous thoughts whistling onto the page. I should start to write this into some form that hopefully resembles what my teacher and class defines as a poem now, so I can hang out before class with my dogs.