Maurice Manning
THREE POEMS
Partly to Think More to Be Left Alone
for Harry Geisberg
I was sitting mildly in the shade
of a hedge apple tree and the stranger,
cooler shade of contemplation
that asks the mind to reach beyond
its ordinary fiddling.
I got a pretty good impression
of the tree, with thorns like rooster spurs
or meaningful commas plotting the sense
of the mute, far-reaching branches.
Branches, not unlike the mind,
growing in strange direction, even
into the withering dark. To think
there must be something to say for growing
this way, or something the dark itself
is saying to draw the mind away
from the easier way it could have gone.
And the commas prick along the branches,
allowing one to read them by touch,
as if the tree is speaking, or
the language of the tree is there,
in elegant repeatable phrases,
stretching and drooping to say itself.
I’m Standing Near Your Green-leaved Spires
So everything you need to live
with a steady stream of delight
burbling inside you like
a stream that’s real, coming down
out of the hills where streams begin
in the mist is in the world already.
It’s right here in plain view,
in the world that’s always been the world.
I’ve been admiring a shadow cast
by a cedar tree and how it stretches
up the hill like a thought the tree is saving.
Yes, the shadow of the tree
is like a thought the tree is saving.
It took me a while to think of that,
about an hour watching the shadow.
I can imagine the mind of a tree
piddling around with thought,
or just observing, the bluebirds are back.
It’s such a lovely day out here.
As clouds blew out of the sky, the shadow
got darker. It was almost night
in there, and some of the other trees
were sleeping through it all because
it’s still their season to be asleep.
But the bluebirds are back, as the shadow
of the tree matter-of-factly put it,
and all of this is going to change,
and every tree around will open
its yellow-greenish mind and think.
I don’t know what else to say, but I’m planning
to watch the shadow a little longer.
While Over Them the Swallows Skim
Is this the way I’ve gone before
through the maze of trees and tall grass
to walk my way into the past
where the seed of the present was dropped in the ground?
I’ve needed to find those people back there,
maybe five or six generations
ago, the people who came here first
and jabbed into the ground the root
of being in this place that ever-
after defined us, including me.
Did they know what they were doing then?
Did they believe that they were stewards
not just of a place but also of time?
Did they imagine this moment?
Did they imagine I’d bring them back
one day, with their shepherd’s crooks and spools,
their calico and flour sacks,
unburying a mule shoe
in the garden or lost back in the woods?
I’d had to do undoing work,
and many times the wrong work
was mine that had to be undone,
because it wasn’t done for time.
When you plant a tree or let a hill
be covered up again with trees
you let the maze be made in time.
It’s that simple, and generations
after maybe someone will notice.
Maurice Manning’s eighth book of poetry, Snakedoctor, will appear in 2023. He lives with his family in Kentucky.