Maurice Manning: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

                                              photo by Steve Cody

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The Slate

 

Way back, the men had funny names

like Tiny, who was anything

but small, and Tiny’s son was called

Tiny Too or Double T,

and Tiny’s wife who was big and mean

was known as Honey, and everybody

called Honey’s sister, Birdie, and Birdie,

who couldn’t talk much less whistle,

was beautiful but touched in the head,

so Birdie lived with them way down

in Fog Town Holler, beside

the green waters of Shoestring Branch,

and only the land was rightly named,

for it was foggy half the day down there

and the branch was skinny and whipped across

the mossy roots and rocks like a snake;

but by the time I came along,

Tiny and Honey were already planted

and Birdie was bent-over and old

and Tiny Too was getting on

and sleeping in the chicken coop

with fourteen chickens and a rooster

named Mister Sump, and Sump was short

for Something, and Tiny Too just said

he liked the company, and besides

he had to guard the chickens against

Redleg Johnny who was a fox,

because Mister Sump was only good

at making chickens, and Tiny Too

would have winked about that sort of thing,

and all of this—I learned it young,

when I was just a scratch of a boy

and I skipped down Shoestring Branch

to Fog Town Holler and found

Old Tiny Too, who told me where

I was from, and who my people were,

and how they named the world around them.

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Maurice Manning's eighth book of poems, Snakedoctor, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2023.  His fourth book, The Common Man, was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize, and his first book, Lawrence Booth's Books of Visions, was selected by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets.  A former Guggenheim fellow, Manning lives with his family on a small farm in Kentucky and teaches at Transylvania University.

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                      Angelo Maria Crivelli, Animals Scene. 17th-Century. Oil on canvas.

 

 

Comments

[Jack Skelley]

Excellent. Thank you!
“The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties..." --Wm Blake

[Michael Whelam]

A delight to read. Every name hypnotic in the way each so aptly playfully generates the next.

[Minnie Bruce Pratt]

The accuracy of human country words, entangling us with the critters around us, what we have to know to understand the losses climate crisis can bring, the relationships that could be lost but do not have to be lost.

[Grace Cavalieri]

Ah Genesis! And the naming of things! But it takes a true poet to say:

..."and Birdie,

who couldn’t talk much less whistle."

[Eileen]

I love this poem. One can picture the people and their animals in their special place.

[Denise Duhamel]

This is such a wonderful and nostalgic look at naming, Maurice! It's making me remember my father's friend Swift who walked with a limp.

[Clarinda]

I am seriously in love with this poem —so much so I long to ask the Adamlike namer how come the fox is called Redlegs— did me forget to put on his black socks???

[lally]

lovely in its precision and poignancy

[lally]

i meant in its poignant precision

[Susan Campbell]

Good one!

[Doug Pell]

So appropriately named. I remain entertained. Thank you, Terence. You continue to deliver.

[Terence Winch]

Doug: Thanks for tuning in.

[Thomas E. Davis]

Loved the mythical feeling of this.