One Man's Dark. Maurice Manning
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from the big butternut log across
the gully wash below the house
in the middle step of the hillside where
my grandmother lived. Each end of the log
was tucked into a stone cradle
and someone had taken an adze and dressed
the top to make it flat enough
for her to walk across without
a rail or a rope. Cold mornings
she crossed the log on her long, dark way
down to the road to meet my aunt
or, later, the Stivers man, who drove her
to the old tipple where she worked
recording the numbers in ledger books
as the coal came down in trucks and away
again by rail or other trucks.
The snow would not stay white for long;
the world was turning inside out
in 1974, and little
by little, a kind of slow forgetting
was happening and something I loved
that would never stop filling my heart
was slowly going away for good.
I’ve kicked the butt-end of that log
in my sleep to wake the snake stretched out
along it. Gollie was the name
she called my aunt — the Stivers man,
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