Читать книгу One Man's Dark - Maurice Manning - Страница 14

MODERNITY

In the old days people got

old, and age diminished them

or not depending on how one thought

of age. Is age a number that

declines with mere increase, against

the grain of simple arithmetic,

in denial of the facts of the force

that brings the rings around the hearts

of trees wider and wider out?

Or is age a complicated way

to give time a true description,

and from that attitude to feel

a thought like an old fish in a pool

swim up, or rise like bubbles floating

from a turtle sinking to the bottom

of a pond? A long time ago

I knew a man named Jonah Payne

who, when the rural electric came,

had said he was too old to get it.

Yet he lived another forty years

or so, beyond the advent of

the age when light could be called forth

with a switch. He switched his fields around —

but that procedure took more time

and thought. By eminent domain

the towers and long transmission lines

divided the sky from the ground beneath it.

It was a mistake, said Mr. Payne,

to hitch up time that way, to take

away its weight and leave an instant.

These observations came to him

at night, when by the stars and moon

he rose to a ridge above the world

and the lights splayed below were few

and innocent enough to look back

at him like a creature whose eyes have for

a moment caught the light of the moon.

But even Jonah Payne, you see,

came to me in a dream, a light

in his own right reflected from

a moon that made its arc across

the sky of sleep — he was a man

whose age was older than his time,

and that is how it used to be.

But now it is another time,

a shorter one, without reflection.