The Mower
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- The Mower
At two, my happiest planet was carpet.Its catching pile made fine crawler lanesround curling fronds and furious petals—Victorian sharawaggi, leading nowhere
beyond the outbacks of floorboards, underlay,beyond the piano's golden pedalpoking its tongue, the sofa's peepshowof dust and dark behind a pleated valance.
This was the feeling map of my whole world,a padded garden of softened blowslaid for those staying close to its ground-plan—
till One came in, tall as a monument,and all I saw above his shoes' black cupswere the grass-cuttings caught in his turn-ups. [End Page 111]
Angela Leighton is Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. She has published many works of literary criticism, as well as four volumes of poetry, including most recently Spills (2016), a volume combining memoir, short story, translations, as well as new poems. Her forthcoming book,, Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature, will be published in May, 2018. al474@cam.ac.uk
