zodiac18 Nov 2005
Here is a story I never told you.
Living in a rented house
on South University in Ann Arbor,
long before we met,
I found bundled letters in
the attic room where I took
myself to work. A young woman
tenant of the attic wrote
these letters to her lover
who had died in a plane crash.
In my thirtieth year with tenure
and a new book coming out, I read
the letters in puzzlement.
She is writing these letters to somebody dead?
There is one good thing about April.
Everyday, Gus and I take a walk
in the graveyard. I am the one who
doesnât piss on your stone. Oh, winter
when snow and ice kept me away.
I worried that you missed me.
Perkins, where the hell are you?
In hell;
Everyday, I play in repertoire
the same script without you,
without love, without audience except for Gus
who waits attentive for cues like
a walk, a biscuit, bedtime. The year of days
without you in your body swept by as quick
as an afternoon. But, each afternoon took a year.
At first, and most outright, I daydreamed about
burning the house, kerosene and pie plates
with a candle lit in the middle.
I locked myself in your study with Gus,
Ada and the rifle my father gave me at twelve.
I killed our cat and our dog and swallowed
a bottle of pills knowing that
if I woke up on fire, I had the gun.
After you died, I stopped rereading history.
I took up Cormick McCarthy for the rage and murder.
Now, I return to Gibbon, secure in his
reasonable civilization, he exercises detachment
as Barbarians skewer Romans. Then, Huns
galloped from the sunrise wearing skulls.
Whatâs new? I see more people now.
In March, I took Kate and Mary to Pierreâs.
At the end of the month, ice dropped to the
pondâs bottom and water flashed and flowed
through pines in Western light.
The year melted into April
and I lived through the hour we
learned last year that you would die.
For the next ten days, my mind sat by our bed again
as you diminished cell by cell. Last week, the
goldfinches flew back for a second spring.
Again, I witnessed snowdrops worry from dead leaves
into air. Now, your hillside daffodils edge up and
today, it is a year since we set you down at
the border of the graveyard on a breezy
April day.
We stood in a circle around the coffin
and its hole under pines and birches to lower you
into the glacial sand. When I dream,
sometimes your hair is long and we make
love like we used to. One nap time,
I saw your face at eighty with many lines,
more flesh, the good bones distinct.
It is astonishing to be old. When I
stand after sitting, I am shocked at how I must
stretch to ease the stiffness out.
When we first spoke of marriage,
we dismissed the notion because you would
be a widow twenty-five years or maybe I
would not be able to make love while desire
still flared in you. Sometimes now, I feel crazy
with desire again as if I were forty,
drinking and just divorced. Ruth Houghton had
a stroke. Our daughter sent me the album of the photographs Roger took in his documentary âPassionâ.
Inside and outside our house,
every room, every corner, one day in September 1984,
I howled as I gazed at that day intact.
Our furniture looked out of place as if
vandals had shoved everything awry.
There were pictures on the walls
we put away long ago. The kitchen wallpaper shone
bright red in Rogerâs kodacolor.
It faded as we watched, not seeing it fade.
- Donald Hall, about Jane Kenyon