Maurice Manning

Maurice Manning was born in 1966 in Lexington, Kentucky, grew up in Danville, Kentucky, and attended Earlham College, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Alabama. His first book, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions (Yale University Press, 2001) was a Yale Series of Younger Poets selection. His second book, A Companion for Owls (Harcourt, 2004), is a verse sequence written in the voice of Daniel Boone. Manning’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry London, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Yale Review, and have earned him writing fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and The Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Scotland. Manning teaches in the writing program at Indiana University in Bloomington.

First

Arriving, we walked down as if we were hill-born

and bred to know only hills, so that the end of hills

was surprising, rolling out before us like a woman’s

skirts gathered and fanned across her lap, like loosely

folded fabric, like calico: spotted and patchworked

as if some big-fingered god had gently smudged

the world he made. Our horses and our dogs paused.

We had not expected glory and it stopped us dead,

which is not altogether uncommon: Moses spying

Canaan, for example, must have first stood silent

before waving his people ahead, the land smothered

in half shadow, half-light like velvet, and steadied

himself, one hand firm on his staff, the other reaching

to his brow, wiping his gray hair back. So I walked

into Kentucky barefooted and clumsy as if I had

sneaked out of school to cheat my lessons and come

upon a girl waiting for me behind a beech tree,

wondering where on earth I’d been. I stood still

on the invisible line and spit across it onto the new

map, making my first mark, wondering if I could

keep such a dark and bloody secret to myself.

A Condensed History of Beauty

1907:	A man digs a deepwell on a hilltop, harnessing gravity, resulting in free indoor plumbing.
1926:	A man and a woman sit in a country parlor by a fire; she reads Sonnets from the Portuguese out loud; he falls alseep.
1937:	A boy rides a chestnut gelding twenty-six miles to town and twenty-six miles back without bouncing once.
1939:	A boy cracks sixty-three hickory nuts with a hammer; a woman proceeds to bake a legendary cake.
1944:	A boy takes a shotgun to a freightyard and blasts lead patterns on the sides of boxcars.
1945:	A man picks up a coal bucket and his heart explodes; two mules drag his casket up a hill; the preacher recites “The Crossing of the Bar.”
1951:	A young man writes his mother from Korea: It has been turrble colt in this Godforsaken two bit place, ha!
1965:	A gambler wins thirty-seven rocky acres and a rough-hewn house in a card game; he hangs a sign by the road: Trespassers Will Be Shot in the Knee.
1972:	A boy climbs a tree with a slingshot in his teeth; he has a powder horn full of pea gravel and shoots at a washtub; it sounds like a church bell.
1973:	A boy listens to a transistor radio while lying in a burned out car; that night, he tells his sister: Today I heard you singing from a little silver box!
1976:	Two boys take the foot-brake off of a bicycle. One boy sits on the handlebars. The pedaling boy says: Let’s close our eyes.

On Death

The best thing about dying is it frees you

from the fear of death; you get it over with,

that fear you spend your whole life dancing

around, as if it were a fire and you were

a wild, ink-streaked Indian, kicking sparks

into the heavens. But death is not anything

like a fire. Death is like the wind: it is air

once held back and now released. Death

is not a buffalo calf half eaten by wolves—

that is an example of life. A man sleeping

in the dog-trot between two cabins, or

a woman raising her skirts in the weeds,

or a collapsed trio of hoops and rotten

barrel staves, the barrel no longer a vessel—

death is like these; it has a still foreverness.

I think of death as the king of quiet falling,

in that, dying we fall, maybe off of a horse,

or maybe into a daughter’s arms, but it is still

falling, like a leaf loosed from a tree, never

to hit the ground. But once we die, the sense

of falling stops because there is nothing

that we are falling from. We become plain

stones in the bottom of a river, unnoticed,

life teeming above us, sometimes someone

peering down at us but seeing a face instead

of a stone, which is not death, but the false

image of death which comes from living in fear.

So death is the one who drops stones into

the water, shattering the image, as we sink,

and we look up from our river of foreverness

at life, painted and wild and scared to death,

and above that is a fire, bound by a rough circle.

On God

Is there a god of the gulf between a man

and a horse? A god who hovers above the trench

of difference? Not a god who makes us notice;

but a god who rakes his hand through the air and makes

a space neither can enter. What about

a god of animal innards? Some god

whose sole creation cleans the blood of an elk?

Perhaps there’s a god of petty disaster

who breaks wagon wheels and paints clouds across

an old man’s eyes. Consider the gods of flint

and primer who work side by side with the gods

of spark and steel; then there’s the god of aim

and the god of near death—a god commonly praised.

Consider a god of small spaces, a fat

man’s misery god, who lives in the shadow

between two rocks and sleeps on moss, content

with the smallness of his task; the god who bends

rivers, the god who flecks the breast of a hawk,

the god who plunders saltworks. I once thought

one god looked over my shoulder and measured

my steps, but now I believe that god is outnumbered

and I am surrounded by countless naked gods,

like spores or dust or birds or trees on fire,

the song, the grit, the mean seed of nakedness.

“[O boss of ashes boss of dust…]”

O boss of ashes boss of dust

you bother with what floats above

my chimney what settles to the ground

you wake the motes from sleep you make

them curtsey in a ray of sun

they hold their tiny breath as if

they’re waiting for the little name

of the dance that’s coming next then they

will take their places Boss if I

were smaller I would join them O

I’d cut a rug or two I’d slap

my hand against my shoe if that’s

the kind of fuss you’re raising Boss

you know I never know for sure

I only know you bother me

from time to time you’ve caught my breath

a time or two you’ve stirred me up

before which makes me want to tell

you Boss I wouldn’t mind it if

you bothered me a little more