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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.