The mop lacks the mystery of the broom. No one thinks of it steering through the stars. No one assumes it has a living name. Also, it lacks the broom’s sleek lines, its held-togetherness. A mop is a floppy thing. If you were unkind, you’d call it homely. On the other hand, its syntax is to be admired. It’s so simple, requiring only “and” and an adverb or two to move it “back and forth” or “up and down” or “over and over and over.” Of course it has a head, fat worms of cotton or some synthetic, but does anyone assume the mop is thinking? It’s best it doesn’t. More than the broom, it does its work in places of great mess and consequence: the slaughter house, the hospital, kitchens where bottles have been thrown against a wall, pots full of sauces dumped from the stove, someone crying in a corner far into the night. Mop it up. What you can. Sometimes sounds get tangled in the long absorbent strings—when you wring them out, you hear what children hear when they shout or scream underwater. There are no mops in the Book of Revelation, yet they have a long history, and their future is assured. At Culloden, at the Somme, at Vadencourt, old women no one pays attention to push their mops back and forth across the battlefields, keeping the new grass clean.