Nathan Manley

Iolan Elegy  

October’s lantern-licked, late at its rocking chair—
picks up folk tunes, strung all a-willowing
down the hogbacks where creekwater’d galloped apace,
white fawn flinching the aspens, flume music,
and by its song you’d understood that something good
had ended there, there in the valleying
out and under of the reservoir: the drowned pines
shimmering, mute, in their hundred-year whelm;
horse memory champing in the blacksilt; lakeweed
sparse, lacing, ghosts flown up the settler’s hearth,
where the steeple of the prairie church is sprung to
like a revenant’s finger, bone-rotten,
from the murk of the lake and making its smart known
by sway of the liquid bells now trailing
a shoal of perch, the like of which should never rise
to worship as did men in bygone days,
lead mine like a colony of bees, cattlemen
afield and blustering their circles, wide,
dollars by the valleyful and even the trees
tuned to our reaping, gilt coin divested,
aspen-stripped and stand by stand, moon full at it too,
ten-thousand scads of guppy-scale silver
twitching in the dark—yet nothing of a childhood
to linger, illusory as the State,
upon it, O world of the water’s tomb which is
a half-remembered snatch of melody
and the underbreath humming of a country porch.

—————

Nathan Manley is a poet, translator, and contracts attorney from Windsor, Colorado. He is the author of the forthcoming collection Native (Codhill Press, 2024) and of two chapbooks, Numina Loci (Mighty Rogue Press, 2018) and Ecology of the Afterlife (Split Rock Press, 2021). Recent poems and Latin translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Tahoma Literary Review, Spillway, Image, Portland Review, The Classical Outlook and others. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. You can find his writing and instrumental music at nathanmmanley.com