Driving home from the hospice, from his death, four a.m. now, his last possessions in a paper bag beside me on the seat, the heavy glasses, the teeth in a margarine tub, his cheap watch on my arm as though I’d stolen time back, the smell of his skin on my hands; over the city…
Donald Hall, Without, poems: In his fourteenth collection, Hall writes with grief, grace, and courage about the poet Jane Kenyon, his late wife. The first half sketches her illness and death. The second half is comprised of verse letters he addresses to Kenyon in the ensuing year. This book stands as a poignant and powerful…
The note was slipped to me on Wednesday, July 20th, at two minutes before three. I know the exact time because I happened to be staring at my watch, wondering if Dr. V. would be running late today, as she sometimes did, when the double doors burst open, and Peacock Throne walked out. I called…
No one is awake yet, neither the cardinals who live in the gnarled, rotted-out apple tree, nor Lucy my younger daughter whose shrieks are our alarm and birdsong. This is the best hour, neither night nor morning, a place in which shadows become more real than the things that cast them. …
I had a boyfriend who told me stories about his family, how an argument could end up with his father grabbing a lit birthday cake in both hands and hurling it out a second-story window. That, I thought, was what a normal family was like: anger sent out across the sill, landing like a gift…
For five seconds or so, backwards seems possible, the heirloom un-be-smithereenable. When the voice first said gently, “We lost her,” Wally roared, “Then go find her!” Freeze frame: this is Simon and me at the pier, alive in some previous hour. Happy, we were happy beyond disbelief.
Wherever we travel it seems to take the same few hours to get there. The plane rises over clouds into an unmarked sky, comes down through clouds to what we have to believe is a different place. But here are the same green road signs the numbered highways of home, with cars going back and…
Look at me. I’m standing on a deck in the middle of Oregon. There are friends inside the house. It’s not my house, you don’t know them. They’re drinking and singing and playing guitars. You love this song, remember, “Ophelia,” Boards on the windows, mail by the door. I’m whispering so they won’t think I’m…
One of the old ones has fallen in. The pond has autumn’s clarity and layering, leaves afloat and sunken, sky reflections over the bottom’s pebbles and scree. I make up names for the colors of this leaf— allol, draeth, breen— while an ant walks all the way up its stem.
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