Terry Trowbridge is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for funding poets during the polycrisis.

Winter Lawn Care

Another anonymous raccoon binged on
the neighbours’ garbage, dragged their
fruit peels and unidentified stains across 
our front yard snow drifts.

The snow is not going to melt so we have to wait
for another snowfall in order for the smell
of rotten coffee and sour pasta sauce
to be erased from the air between our
front door and our car door.

The neighbours are not making eye contact.
Which is fine, because we have no kids to play with their kids
and the windows are staying shut in the cold.

Nonetheless, I stood in our shed, looking at
our rake, our lawnmower, our hose, our saw, an old spade,
and the emotion I was feeling was blame.
Blame as if it was the neighbours’ fault
that we have not invented a garden tool for this particular problem
of Canadian lawn care.

We have no tool to cover private smells exposed 
by winter raccoons.

Of course it is not their fault (the raccoons or the neighbours),
that our national ingenuity is spent on swearing and shrugging
to our frozen car, or setting peanut butter raccoon traps.

The mess and this indignant wait for the next snow
are ways the city exposes how absurdly vulnerable our privacy is,
and our lack of solutions to city embarrassments exposes 
how we semi-detached Canadians are still a tree-hidden 
cabin-in-the-woods people.

Not city dwellers, like the raccoon people are.