The city restricts watering during summer, for good reason,
so the man tends the brown patches daily by hand.
Seven thirty and seven thirty at morning & at night. 
He times each session each day down to the minute.

He gets to know his lawn intimately, patch by patch, 
the narrow band right by the sidewalk nine feet long,
the yellowed oval that stretches out just behind the mailbox,
the tight corners near the turns by the lawn lights.

His fist around the hose, his thumb widens the spray,
the mist cooling the only man outside this hot night.
Sometimes cars pass him, their fingers lifted in a hello,
their palms steering them down the alley to their garages. 

On vacation, he worries about the lawn, patch by patch.
Over time all see the green return stronger than before.

Over the summer, I wrote a lot of watering-the-lawn poems. This one is kind of a sonnet, but with ten words per line rather than ten syllables.