Donald Hall: Three poems

Coming to Our House

We lived on our own

in the long white farmhouse where as a child

I daydreamed to live. Leaves

changed and fell; we stacked six cords of wood.

Jane painted our names

on the outsized mailbox. The first Sunday

I thought they'd expect us

to go to Church, and we heard the young

preacher quote "Rilke,

the German poet." Weeks later, when Jane

had the flu on a Sunday

and would stay home, I felt restless.

At the last minute I cried,

"I can't stand it," and rushed to Church.

When it dropped to

thirty below, we kept four woodstoves burning:

the kitchen cooking range,

the parlor Glenwood, the new Jtul,

and in Jane's study

the dateless old tin and iron stove we found

in the back chamber.

Before bed I lugged seven tilting loads

from the woodshed, filled up

the Glenwood and closed it for the night.

At five in the morning

I opened its doors--shaking ash down,

exposing gold coals-

to load it again, and went back to bed

while outraged maple warmed

the house. Sitting to work, I would sense

that a stove was needy

and get up to stretch and haul some wood.

We walked in the white house

like ghosts among ghosts who cherished us.

Everything we looked at

exalted and raptured our spirits:-

full moon, pale blue

asters, swamp maples Chinese red, ghost birches,

stone walls, cellar holes,

and lopsided stretched farmhouses like ours.

The old tenants watched us

settle in, five years, and then the house

shifted on its two-hundred

year-old sills, and became our house.

The Reward

Curled on the sofa

in the fetal position, Jane wept day

and night, night and day.

I could not touch her; I could do nothing.

Melancholia fell

like the rain over Ireland for weeks

without end.

I never

belittled her sorrows or joshed at

her dreads and miseries.

How admirable I found myself.

Practices

Jane spent a morning

picking dandelion greens with Mabelle,

our ninety-year-old cousin,

then stewed the greens up with salt pork

according to practice,

as she made red flannel hash out of

leftover boiled dinner,

grinding up beets to make the redness

according to practice.

This was the place where we chose to live.

Unlike Mabelle, or Kate

and Wesley, we flew to New Orleans

and London, to Shanghai

and Calcutta, reading our poems.

We smiled without stopping

at receptions in South Dakota

and Ohio. We bowed

to applause, submitted to questions

about how we got

ideas, slept flying home contented,

and deposited

checks, according to another practice.

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