Читать книгу One Man's Dark - Maurice Manning - Страница 11

NO. 9 WIRE

I go down close, eye-blank

to the first page of a thing, like the hank

of wire I hung over a nail

in the barn. I’ve twisted the origins

of the wire and it’s likely Mister Key,

careless and melancholy long

before my time, it’s likely he

is the one who left the wire, perhaps

not long enough to hitch a gate.

But people have their visions, don’t they?

Where everything inside has purpose

and nothing is cast out because

belonging to the vision is

the vision. I’ve seen a hive of bees

work mountain laurel trees, I’ve seen

them visit every blossom, and thought

to myself, so must it be in heaven.

The other man from the old days

I think about, Sylvanus Shade,

took a wild rose cane

and bent it to a shepherd’s crook,

and when he died they stuck the crook

in the ground and roses bloomed upon it,

tresses of roses tumbled down,

as he had claimed they would. He said

there was no end to anything,

not even death would be an end.

His daughter, Sylvie, made a teacher

of the schoolmarm type, and she

taught Mister Key, back when the roads

were traces and tracks along the streams.

I’ve seen the way he made a 4,

marked backwards on a barn beam.

And he must have learned the philosophy

that disarray is beautiful,

and even a piece of wire is rare,

though what a man could use it for

is more uncommon still, and endless.

So he unknowingly taught me,

just as careless with my numbers

and with melancholy of my own,

who loves rose canes and bees

and the sweet of mountain laurel trees,

and all the unseen underneath.

The people who had this place before

it came to me were the Graves, but the man

who built the barn was Mister Key —

I’ve heard he was a troubled man —

oh, he was clever with his hands,

but sorely troubled otherwise,

like a man who’s wandered out of a book.