Poem of the Day

I recently read Without, Donald Hall’s collection of poems written during his wife Jane Kenyon’s battle with leukemia and after her death. I found it profoundly moving. Previously the first thing that came to mind when I thought of Donald Hall was O Cheese (which I can’t help loving), but now it’s a whole different ballgame. Anyway, my summary of Without is that Donald Hall was incredibly generous to share such an intimate glimpse into his pain. It was almost like reading a novel, and I was moved to tears more than once. I don’t think that I will post any poems from that collection, because they are much more powerful read as a whole. However, Hall has lots of other great poems, and I intend to share a number of them. Today’s is called Affirmation and you can hear Hall’s reading along with some comments courtesy of the Poetry Foundation. As a precaution, I saved the file as a backup.

Affirmation
By Donald Hall

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

I get to spend time with my favorite poetry pals this weekend, which always gives me more fodder for posting. They had heard Donald Hall read this poem in Chicago last week, and we all enjoyed it. An mp3 of his reading is available on poetryfoundation.org, but I saved it here in case they take it down. It’s well worth listening to!

To a Waterfowl
By Donald Hall

Women with hats like the rear ends of pink ducks
applauded you, my poems.
These are the women whose husbands I meet on airplanes,
who close their briefcases and ask, “What are you in?”
I look in their eyes, I tell them I am in poetry,

and their eyes fill with anxiety, and with little tears.
“Oh, yeah?” they say, developing an interest in clouds.
“My wife, she likes that sort of thing? Hah-hah?
I guess maybe I’d better watch my grammar, huh?”
I leave them in airports, watching their grammar,

and take a limousine to the Women’s Goodness Club
where I drink Harvey’s Bristol Cream with their wives,
and eat chicken salad with capers, with little tomato wedges
and I read them “The Erotic Crocodile,” and “Eating You.”
Ah, when I have concluded the disbursement of sonorities,

crooning, “High on thy thigh I cry, Hi!”—and so forth—
they spank their wide hands, they smile like Jell-O,
and they say, “Hah-hah? My goodness, Mr. Hall,
but you certainly do have an imagination, huh?”
“Thank you, indeed,” I say; “it brings in the bacon.”

But now, my poems, now I have returned to the motel,
returned to l’eternel retour of the Holiday Inn,
naked, lying on the bed, watching Godzilla Sucks Mount Fuji,
addressing my poems, feeling superior, and drinking bourbon
from a flask disguised to look like a transistor radio.

And what about you? You, laughing? You, in the bluejeans,
laughing at your mother who wears hats, and at your father
who rides airplanes with a briefcase watching his grammar?
Will you ever be old and dumb, like your creepy parents?
Not you, not you, not you, not you, not you, not you.

I read this poem with my poetry pals and we had a lovely conversation about it. I found another one by Donald Hall to share.

The Old Pilot
By Donald Hall

He discovers himself on an old airfield.
He thinks he was there before,
but rain has washed out the lettering of a sign.
A single biplane, all struts and wires,
stands in the long grass and wildflowers.
He pulls himself into the narrow cockpit
although his muscles are stiff
and sits like an egg in a nest of canvas.
He sees that the machine gun has rusted.
The glass over the instruments
has broken, and the red arrows are gone
from his gas gauge and his altimeter.
When he looks up, his propeller is turning,
although no one was there to snap it.
He lets out the throttle. The engine catches
and the propeller spins into the wind.
He bumps over holes in the grass,
and he remembers to pull back on the stick.
He rises from the land in a high bounce
which gets higher, and suddenly he is flying again.
He feels the old fear, and rising over the fields
the old gratitude. In the distance, circling
in a beam of late sun like birds migrating,
there are the wings of a thousand biplanes.

I was reminiscing about O Cheese with my aunt yesterday so I thought I’d post another poem by Donald Hall.

Waters
By Donald Hall

A rock drops in a bucket;
quick fierce
waves exhaust themselves
against the tin circle.

A rock in a pool;
a fast
splash, and ripples move out
interrupted by weeds.

The lake enormous and calm;
a stone falls;
for an hour the surface
moves, holding to itself the frail

shudders of its skin. Stones
on the dark bottom
make the lake calm,
the life worth living.

I read this poem last year in an anthology and I was dismayed to find that I couldn’t locate it in its entirety anywhere online. I was even more dismayed to find that Donald Hall’s Old and New Poems had been lost from the public library. For some reason I didn’t check the UT library. Anyway, I was alerted to the fact that Donald Hall is the new Library of Congress’ 14th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry by Ryan. I remembered that I never got to post the lovely cheese poem so I checked and the UT library did indeed have the book. So here you go. It’s best if read out loud enthusiastically! Enjoy!

O Cheese
By Donald Hall

In the pantry the dear dense cheeses, Cheddars and harsh
Lancashires; Gorgonzola with its magnanimous manner;
the clipped speech of Roquefort; and a head of Stilton
that speaks in a sensuous riddling tongue like Druids.

O cheeses of gravity, cheeses of wistfulness, cheeses
that weep continually because they know they will die.
O cheeses of victory, cheeses wise in defeat, cheeses
fat as a cushion, lolling in bed until noon.

Liederkranz ebullient, jumping like a small dog, noisy;
Pont l’Evêque intellectual, and quite well informed; Emmentaler
decent and loyal, a little deaf in the right ear;
and Brie the revealing experience, instantaneous and profound.

O cheeses that dance in the moonlight, cheeses
that mingle with sausages, cheeses of Stonehenge.
O cheeses that are shy, that linger in the doorway,
eyes looking down, cheeses spectacular as fireworks.

Reblochon openly sexual; Caerphilly like pine trees, small
at the timberline; Port du Salut in love; Caprice des Dieux
eloquent, tactful, like a thousand-year-old hostess;
and Dolcelatte, always generous to a fault.

O village of cheeses, I make you this poem of cheeses,
O family of cheeses, living together in pantries,
O cheeses that keep to your own nature, like a lucky couple,
this solitude, this energy, these bodies slowly dying.