Читать книгу One Man's Dark - Maurice Manning - Страница 7

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 a circle, a wheel inside

another turning wheel. I’ve gone

back there to lonely silence, but once

I went and had the lonelier sense

that just before there had been singing.