Maurice Manning

Listen to the Mockingbird

I like a quiet little house

with dreamy trees around it.  Let

the house contain a kind of mind

and let the realm of dreamy trees

be a mind more infinite, and let

the mind in the house discover by

beautiful degrees it lives

inside the infinite mind of trees.

When the mind residing in the house

wakes from its little sleep in the dead

of night to hear the mockingbird

fiddling around with its voice

from the top of the tallest tree, the mind

that’s smaller will know the infinite mind,

which is unreasonable, is there

in the permanent blur of green singing.

I always find this dilemma sweet—

to fill the space of contemplation

with desirable symbols in order to speak

about the things that aren’t symbolic,

and there’s a lot that’s not symbolic—

I mean, infinity is real—

only the mind cannot contain it,

so you put a little symbol there—

a candle burning through a window,

or a coffee tin with buttons in it,

or, back in the days of dynasties,

you took a piece of silk and painted

cherry blossoms down the side

with a mist hanging over the valley.

It’s all pretty mysterious,

but some of the symbols you can find

are starkly beautiful.  I like

the coffee tin with buttons in it,

it’s not an ordinary symbol,

and you have to know it’s full of buttons

or else you’ll miss the larger meaning.

My Eye

He knew the buckle-end of a belt,

a friend I had in second grade.

The innocent mistake he made

was in summer going shirtless.  The welts

were purple blossoms down his back.

I notice now he had no thought

to hide them, accepting what he got.

The bitter plainness of that fact.

He had a dog whose name was Leroy,

a little dog who loved the boy.

Now there’s a knot I can’t untie,

and every time I’ve tried I’ve failed

to sweep those flowers from my eye,

those purple blossoms from my eye.

The Handle

In a peaceful pastoral moment, I turned

an iron handle up with a hoe.

I was tending the garden, so to speak,

in early summer swelter, when

the blade of the hoe plinked against

the handle.  It was a simple L

leaning over the loosened ground

and I looked, I looked at the rusty L.

It could have been for anything,

but now it was only a heavy handle.

I could stick it in the world to fill

the disappearing pools of water,

or use it for a miracle

machine to bring a mountain back.

I could turn it to the right to make

the sun go down and turn it left

again if the world wanted daylight.

I held the handle to the sky

to see where it might go, to see

if I could turn it in the world,

but I couldn’t use it in the blue.

I had to live with everything

the way it was.  So I looked at the handle

in my hand—the hand with an L in it,

ironically—and for a moment

it seemed alive, like an old expression.

Then I let it thud into my pocket.

It’s just a handle now, but I wanted

to feel the weight of something useless.

It had been for years in the dark ground

and then I turned it to the light.

And then I put it back in the dark,

but that was beautiful to me.

Molly McCully Brown & Susannah Nevison