You’re squeezed into your father’s Asics, their soles dyed with chlorophyl, pushing his machine in concentric strips along those old etched patterns—but you’re no boy. The father is stroked in a rehab hospital five miles away and your marriage is back in Omaha on its own gurney, well past saving. These are last rites at full blast, an iPhone concerned about your hearing, your hearing Phil Collins so loudly and closely, studying divorce ballads like the sacred texts you apprenticed in sixth, seventh, eighth grade, as if you knew anything about heartache. And there above the engine’s rumble they’ve aged like fine wine: keys and horns, snap of snare, angry toms.

Of course you knew about heartache, it was in the house. Right up there, lording over lawn. It rode the circuits and ducts, skittered through the blazing attic and over crawlspace gravel. So maybe it was all inevitable, not just the marriage snapping under their own turning blades, but the father failing, half his body and a slice of his mind. In the previous months, he’d helped you turn your soil and you saw a way through. That people can do better, can be better, that forgiveness is as real as the seasons. He proved it. And now he’s trapped in his body, angry. Take me home, he told you.

This isn’t that first Phil hit you’re listening to, not the murder ballad with the cruel outburst you remember too well. Your deep tracks are radio slick, electric piano and fusion guitar, gated drums and drum machines. Your heart’s on your sleeve but your sleeve is rolled up. The mower is turning in tighter rectangles and when you meet yourself in the middle, the boy, the father, the lawnmower man, there’s nowhere to go.