Mined from the notebooks, Sunday morning, September 9, 2018. Posted Monday morning, September 9, 2019.
Not my favorite poet named Donald, but he was pretty good. Donald Hall, who died June 23, 1918, in his living room at his home in Wilmot, New Hampshire in 2012. Photo by Gary Knight via Beth Macy.
A note from the Department of In Search of Lost Time. Sunday, September 9, 2018.
6:28 a.m. Porch lights off. Screws on cabinet door hinges tightened. Laundry in. Three poems read, three cups of coffee downed, two blog posts written. Day underway.
The cabinet doors close completely again. The third cup of coffee won’t be the last. Those two blog posts went into the notebooks and I’m not sure when I’ll dig them out and type them up. The three poems are by Donald Hall. Here’s my favorite of the three:
“Scenic View”
Every year the mountains
Get paler and more distant---
Trees less green, rock piles
Disappearing---as emulsion
From a billion Kodaks
Sucks color out.
In fifteen years
Monadnock and Kearsarge,
The Green Mountains
And the White, will turn
Tint removed
Atom by atom to albums
In Medford and Greenwich,
While over the valleys
The still intractable granite
Rears with unseeable peaks
Fatal to airplanes.
Been some year so far for poets and writers. LeGuin, Roth, Wolfe, Naipul, Hall. Hall was never one of my favorite poets. He wasn’t even my favorite poet named Donald. But right now, this morning, he's both.
It’s exhilarating how much interesting, fun, and beautiful work there is to read when you don’t ask yourself questions about what constitutes great literature and who counts as a great writer.
I was a bit distracted when Hall died back in June. I missed the news of his death. Good thing. If I’d known I’d have done some re-reading, maybe even have bought his final book of poems, or checked it out of the library, at the time, and then I’d have read this one, which would not have done me any good.
Each morning I made my wayamong gangways, elevators,and nurses’ pods to Jane’s roomto interrogate the grave helperswho tended her through the nightwhile the ship’s massive engineskept its propellers turning.Week after week, I sat by her bedwith black coffee and the Globe.The passengers on this voyagewore masks or cannulaeor dangled devices that drippedchemicals into their wrists.I believed that the shiptraveled to a harborof breakfast, work, and love.I wrote: "When the infusionsare infused entirely, bonemarrow restored and lymphoblastsremitted, I will take my wife,bald as Michael Jordan,back to our dog and day." Today,months later at home, thesewords turned up on my deskas I listened in case Jane calledfor help, or spoke in delirium,ready to make the agitateddrive to Emergency againfor readmission to the hugevessel that heaves water monthafter month, without leavingport, without moving a knot,without arrival or destination,its great engines pounding.
The way I learned Hall was gone was by coming across the news while I was searching online for something else. The Paris Review republished an essay of his by way of an obit. “Learning to Write Less”. This paragraph hit me like a sock in the eye:
Back then, I wrote all day, getting up at five. By this time, I rise scratchy at six or twitch in bed until seven. I drink coffee before I pick up a pen. I look through the newspaper. I try to write all morning, but exhaustion shuts me down by ten o’clock. I dictate a letter. I nap. I rise to a lunch of crackers and peanut butter, followed by further exhaustion. At night I watch baseball on television, and between innings run through the New York Times Book Review. I roll over all night. Breakfast. Coffee.
I felt like I was being addressed personally by the Ghost of Mannions Yet to Come. Actually, this sounds too much like my routine now. Maybe that’s why I feel so ambitious this morning. I’m negatively inspired. Now I’ve written a third blog post. This one. It’s gone into my notebook with the other two. I’ll type it up later. Right now I’m making more coffee and looking for another job to put my screwdriver to.
PS. I feel like I’ve struck too melancholy a note. I’ll wind up with the third poem I read. This one cheered me up. You can guess why:
"The Lone Ranger"
Anarchic badlands spread without a road
And from the river west no turned up loam;
No farmer prayed for rain, no settler’s horse
But one time blundered riderless to home.Unfriendly birds would gather in the air,
A circling kind of tombstone. As for the law,
No marshal live for long unless he could
Defeat his mirror’d image to the draw.So now he rode upon a sliver horse.
He stood for law and order. Anarchy
Like flood or fire roared through every gate.
But he and Tonto hid behind a treeAnd when the bandits met to split the loot,
He blocked the door. With silver guns he shot
The quick six-shooters from their snatching hands
And took them off to jail and let them rot.For him the badlands were his mother’s face.
He made an order where all order lacked
From Hanged Boy Junction to the Rio Grande.
Why did he wear a mask? He was abstract.
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