<B>"The Gravestone Carver Speaks"

I must be getting old: it’s almost as quiet outside
as inside me now. All these years of marble dust rinsed
from my hair, neck, all the old familiar trails it took down
my body – Jude above, tipping her dim gray pail.
All these years chipping away
inscriptions that never could say…
And all the red-eyed people speaking softly, so as not
to awaken the sleeping baby they sensed to be in the back
far corner of my shop. It was never there.
Oh we thought about it some, back when passion mainly
ordered our lives. Sometimes, from the chalk Sunday mornings
are made of, Jude would murmur me awake, murmur
about a son. I’m quieter now, which is fine. I plan
what I’ll eat, drink fruit juice only before noon, close
the day down with milk and books. I find myself reading
more and more writers who, themselves, grew old,
quieter, as shouting hurts my ears and the energy and
gesture seem a waste.
My hands are still good, my arms strong. I remember,
early on, the challenges: the B, J, Q, R, S and U;
the exact, deep period – how it should stand for someone
having been; spacing dilemmas that had more to do with me
than with the deceased; weather. And, much later,
I remember sensing that my own time was coming:
the foolish battle I had with myself, should I or should I
not write, then gouge, my own stone so as to lift
that weight from the town. But I recall other things as well:
how the rock would heat up in summer, the sun distributed
inside; the time, overnight!, three cicadas left their shells
on my shop door, and how those husks weathered two major storms,
then a third; how Jude would weave between
the stood samples with my sandwich and apple and iced
water or tea, the gold hair on her neck darkening
against her moist skin. I remember working Jude’s stone:
never have I been so far from myself, never have I heard so well
what was going on outside me – the birds, children
just off from school, the grass’s imagined cry of pain
as I shifted my weight. The question of working my own
stone is easy now. I will. But what to say?, for there is
no one I have to speak to, no heir. Perhaps
instead of language, or in spite of it, I will

Suffer my stone to uphold pictures
from my childhood Book of Facts.
Upper left,
our modern world’s largest bird, the Peruvian condor;
upper right,
a quarter moon to fly to;
wheat in wind across the middle;
below my name and dates a descending series of fish – the first a trout,
the second a sturgeon,
the third one’s prehistoric and nosing off into an area
I have chiselled
to encourage the growth of algae.

George Manner, born in Louisiana, spent the last eighteen years in Houston before moving recently to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he teaches at Santa Fe Community College. In 1984 he won the PEN Southwest Discovery Prize for Poetry. He has published in, among others, The Southern Review, Shendandoah, GulfCoast, and in the UK, The Realto, as well as in two anthologies, The Montana Poets Anthology (1979) and A Trout in the Milk.