While I can’t say Larkin is a favorite poet of mine, nevertheless, when I came across a bit of verse from this poem today, I looked it up, of course, and discovered that I had committed a similar bloody slaughter, 40 or 50 years ago. We had grass in our backyard once and could even throw the frisbee there, or a small rubber football, or a whiffle ball. Of course, having grass there meant having to mow it regularly.
I remember two disasters associated with my backyard mowing. The first victim was a fairly small garter snake. I had inadvertently clipped a section from his tail and suddenly, as I pulled the mower back, there he was reared up as if he were a giant, venom-spitting cobra. I could see where I had taken a piece of flesh from his lower region, but I had never been confronted by a creature so ineffective and so furious. He struck and struck and struck while I watched amazed, a little appalled, and also amused; its reaction was so out of portion to its size. I was of course sorry that I had hurt the little creature, even though whenever I came upon a large rat or hog nose snake unexpectedly, I always experienced what Emily Dickinson described in one of poems as “zero at the bone.”
Neither my wife nor I would ever harm a non venomous snake; however, for a while, as she was transforming our backyard into a garden that a KET documentary, several years ago, included as one of the seven secret gardens of Kentucky, I was required to capture the large snakes she encountered there and safely remove them. I always did and they always made me shiver as I caught and picked them up. I always took them elsewhere and released them safely; sometimes I called the college’s resident biologist who collected snakes, and he would drive by and literally take them off my hands. I remember wearing gloves; he was fearless and used bare hands. His wife, I remember, taught psychology at Berea, and for the life of me, I cannot remember their names.
Eventually that cutting day in the dim and distant past, the little garter snake calmed down and slithered away. I made certain it was well gone before I continued mowing. My second victim was not so fortunate.
Whenever we found a box turtle on a local street or road, my wife would insist that I pull over and rescue the turtle before a Kentucky driver saw it and aimed for it, too often the case, unfortunately. To this day we have at least one box turtle living in the backyard garden who usually appears once or twice a year and then miraculously, it seems, vanishes without a trace. Various times Mary would come in the house to get me to see the turtle only to discover that in the five minutes that summoning took, the turtle had vanished.
Several years ago we had two lovely turtles in one of our ponds. Of course they ate the feeder fish she put in the pond too, but they were delightful to watch and feed regular turtle food pellets. They lasted into the second year. Then one disappeared; a month or two later the second one vanished and we have not seen them since. Our backyard is fenced and difficult for creatures like that to leave, but these two seemed to have managed.
Well, I have delayed my tragic story long enough, the one that goes back 40 or 50 years, when we still had grass and I could walk and mow. It was another hot summer day and I had mowed the easy parts of the yard, as well as under the apple tree (I think it was an apple tree then, now long gone), where I happened to have to duck under a branch that was head height, in order to mow under the tree. One day I looked up to avoid knocking my head on it as I mowed, only to discover a very large rat snake stretched out along it. Fascinating! We agreed not disturb one another and that was fine, peaceful coexistence you could say.
However, on the day in question, very long grass grew along the chain link fence on the south side of the yard. It was difficult to get the mower along the fence so I tended to let it grow and not worry about cutting it every time. This day, however, I unfortunately figured out a way to get the mower to cut the grass. I would simply push down on the handle, raise the mower into the air above the tall grass and then gently lower the mower down onto the grass. So I did, but when the mower came all the way down on the grass there was a god-awful racket and green grass and turtle shell and blood shot out of the side of the machine. I had killed one of the backyard turtles that had been, apparently, resting in the long grass. I was sick at heart for I really like turtles. As with the snake, I can still see the consequences of my blind mowing. Thus when I looked up Larkin’s poem, I was immediately reminded of these incidents. I avoided saying, for a bit, struck by the similarity!
God be with us, every one.
The Mower
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
Philip Larkin, "The Mower" from Collected Poems. Copyright © Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.
Images: turtle in pond, our pond, I think.
Day lily with bug, another backyard denizen, with wings, and green!
