Four short lines, no punctuation, and a whole argument about grief tucked inside them. In Dave Bonta's "The mower against gardens," a speaker looks at someone else's sorrow, notices how carefully shaped it is, and responds by cropping his own hair, blaming the weather.
Everything in the first stanza turns on the word "art." We usually think of sorrow as raw, but here it is something arranged, pruned and cultivated like the garden it appears in. The poem never says whose sorrow it is or what caused it. "Her" stays nameless, and the garden might be literal, a plot tended by a woman in mourning, or a figure for how she has ordered her grief. The poem doesn't choose. The line break helps: "I saw the art of sorrow" can stand alone for a beat as a general statement, and then "in her garden" drops it into a particular patch of earth.
The second stanza is grammatically loose in a way that rewards attention. "Cutting my hair close" has no firm anchor. It could describe the speaker, who sees all this while being barbered or barbering himself. It could also drift back toward the garden, where cutting is the work of the title's mower. A mower levels things, and a close haircut turns a head into a lawn. "Close" also does double duty, since it can mean cropped but also near, intimate, shut. All of this sits in four syllables.
The title shares its wording with Andrew Marvell's seventeenth-century poem, in which a mower condemns gardens as artificial things that corrupt nature. If we hear that echo, "art" gains an edge, because in that tradition art laid over nature is suspect. The speaker's blunt haircut then reads as a counter-gesture: against ornament, against tidy feeling, toward something plain. That is an inference from the title, not something the poem announces.
Then comes "the weather being hot," which may be the most telling line. It is a flat, offhand reason, the least poetic explanation available, delivered straight after the most poetic phrase. Cutting hair has been tied to mourning in many cultures, so the practical excuse may be hiding a gesture of sympathy, or a private grief of the speaker's own. The poem doesn't say. It lets the gap between a grand perception and a trivial explanation do the work, and that gap suggests how people often handle other people's pain, with small bodily acts and a shrug about the weather instead of speeches.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, but the rhythm shifts in a way you can feel. "I saw the art of sorrow" has room to breathe, with four beats, and "in her garden" shrinks to two. The second stanza is plainer and more even, and it ends on "hot," a single blunt syllable that closes the poem like a snip of clippers. The consonants carry a similar contrast. The soft hiss of "saw," "sorrow" and "close" gives way to the harder clip of "cutting" and "hot." Quietly, "sorrow" and "close" share a long *o*, an echo across the stanza break that links the grief to the haircut without any rhyme.
Tense matters too. "Saw" is firmly past, but "cutting" and "being" are participles with no fixed time, so the haircut seems to hover alongside the seeing. The poem ends not on a conclusion but in the middle of a moment.
That compression is its significance. In so few words it sets two images side by side, one ornamental and one practical, and trusts the reader to feel the tension between them. It also has a small irony: a poem that appears to be against gardens is itself carefully trimmed. Its spareness is a kind of art, and the plainness it seems to prefer is something it has deliberately cultivated.