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This book is for MLPS, my love and light.
I will sing for my beloved my love-song about his vineyard...
Isaiah 5:1
Contents
Chapel on the Way to Hobo Town
The Man in the Country of His Dream
Bridge on Unnamed Branch of Big Goose Creek
A Field of Tiger Lilies in Kentucky
Culture
Coming down through the Woods after a Rain
Something to Say about Possums
The Geography of Yonder
Funeral, Country Church, beside a Stream in Old Kentucky
Theology
Symbolism
Going Back to Bimble
Evangelism
Birds Arriving in Dim Light
Justice
Provincial Thought
An Apparition
Patch of Light in Deep Woods
Southern City Poem, Early ’70s
Amid the Flood of Mortal Ills Prevailing
Obedience
The Mark on the Wall
The Woodcock
The Gods
Old-Time Kentucky Salt-Kettle Dream
A Dream with Old Men inside It
Grammar
Hill Philosophy
Winter Work
Another River Still
A Portion of the Cosmos in Kentucky
The Wash
Fog over Beech Fork Valley
Sunday School
The Beginning
Slow Class, Sixth Grade
The Foster Boy
Stream at Night
Cathedral up on Posey Ridge
The Watching Tree
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Maurice Manning
Copyright
Special thanks
THE PINCH
Here in Kentucky, a world and, yet,
a second, unknowable world are drawn
almost together between God’s thumb
and famous, animating finger.
It’s a tight place, but I’ve seen it —
believe me, I see it every day.
I even go down to it, back
in the woods behind the hill where the land
goes down below the green knob
to rest in the still dark, as if
that place is a room with something left
inside it. How a room, even
this one that has no walls and the mere
pitch of the sky for a makeshift,
homely roof, must be a place
where some existence shows its proof.
What it is is like a voice
that sounded itself from silence once,
and every sound since then has been
an echo and echoes of the voice.
Why wouldn’t I believe a kind
of unexpected heaven here
comes close, why wouldn’t I believe
in the complicated beauty of once?
It’s how we get a circle drawn
around