Donald Hall: Three poems

Coming to Our House

We lived upon our own

in the drawn out 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 cogitation they'd expect us

to pass to Church, and we heard the young

preacher repeat "Rilke,

the German poet." Weeks later, when Jane

had the flu upon a Sunday

and would stay abode I felt restless.

At the last minute I cried,

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

When it dropp to

thirty below, we kept four woodstoves burning:

the kitchen cooking range,

the parlor Glenwood the novel Jtul,

and in Jane's study

the dateless of advanced age tin and iron stove we found

in the back chamber.

Before bed I lugg seven tilting loads

from the woodshed, filled up

the Glenwood and clos it for the night.

At five in the morning

I uncloseed 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 secure up to stretch and haul a certain number of wood.

We walked in the white house

like souls among ghosts who cherished us.

Everything we gazeed at

exalted and raptured our spirits:-

full secondary planet pale blue

asters, swamp maples Chinese r spirit birches,

stone walls, cellar holes

and lopsided stretched farmhouses like ours.

The elderly tenants watched us

settle in, five years, and then the house

shifted upon its two-hundred

year-old sills, and became our house.

The Reward

Curl upon 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 above Ireland for weeks

without end

I never

belittled her sorrows or joshed at

her dreads and miseries.

How admirable I rest myself.

Practices

Jane spent a morning

picking dandelion virids with Mabelle,

our ninety-year-old cousin,

then stewed the virids up with salt pork

according to practice,

as she made r flannel hash on the outside 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 novel Orleans

and London, to Shanghai

and Calcutta, reading our poems

We smiled without stopping

at receptions in southern Dakota

and Ohio. We bowed

to applause, submitted to questions

about by what means we got

ideas, slept flying residence contented,

and deposited

checks, according to another practice.

Copyright World poesy Incorporated May 1996

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