Donald Hall

At sixteen he dismisses his mother with contempt. She hears with dread the repulsive wave’s approach and her fifty-year-old body smothers under water. An old man loses half his weight, as if by stealth, but finds in his shed his great-grandfather’s knobbly cane, and hobbles toward youth beside the pond’s swart water. She listens to the dun-colored whippoorwill’s three-beat before dawn, and again when dusk enters the cornfield parched and wanting water. He imagines but cannot bring himself to believe that the dead woman enters his house disguised or that the young rabbi made

1 “Always Be Closing,” Liam told us— abc of real estate, used cars, and poetry. Liam the dandy loved Brooks Brothers shirts, double-breasted suits, bespoke shoes, and linen jackets. On the day Liam and Tree married in our backyard, Liam and I wore Chuck’s burgundy boho-prep high-tops that Liam bought on Fifth Avenue. 2 When the rain started, we moved indoors and Liam read a Quartet aloud. T.S. Eliot turned old and frail at sixty, pale, preparing for death. Then poets of new generations died—Frank O’Hara first, then Jim Wright with throat cancer in a Bronx hospice, Sylvia Plath beside the oven, Thom Gunn of an overdose, Denise 3 Levertov, Bob Creeley, Jane Kenyon... In a New York bar, Liam told me eccentric, affectionate stories about a road trip in Tree’s country of Montana, and the joy they felt in the abundance of their marriage. At Bennington Tree said, “Fourteen years after the wedding in your backyard, I love Liam with my entire heart.” 4 Liam’s face changed quickly as he spoke, eyes and mouth erupting with gusto as he improvised his outrageous, cheerful, inventive obscenities. When I first met him—I expounded at a young poet’s do—his bearded face was handsome and expressionless. He would not defer to a poet fifty years old! After a few months 5 he was revising my lines for me, making the metaphors I couldn’t. Even now, working at poems, I imagine for a moment Liam disassembling them. A year ago he watched the progress of age turn me skeletal, pale flesh hanging loosely in folds from my arms, and thin rib-bones like grates above a sagging belly. 6 His body would never resemble my body. Four or five times a week we wrote letters back and forth, talking about class structure, about how Tree took charge over the Academy of American Poets, about poems and new attacks on free speech... When I won a notorious prize, Liam sent me eighty-one notions 7 about projects I might undertake. Number fifty-six instructed me: “Urge poets to commit suicide.” His whole life he spoke of suicide lightly, when he wasn’t preserving the First Amendment from Jesse Helms, or enduring two colon cancers, or watching films, or chatting with Tree, or undergoing heart surgeries. 8 If he walked their dog Keeper one block, he had to take nitroglycerin. When Jane was dying, Liam and Tree drove up to say goodbye. I wheelchaired Jane to a pile of books by her chair to find the color plate of Caillebotte’s shadowy kitchen garden at Yerres for the jacket of Otherwise, when Tree would design it. I think of Jane’s 9 horror if she were alive to know that on August fifteenth Liam pulled the shotgun’s trigger. The night before, wearing a tux over a yellow silk shirt, he danced with Tree once again, before bed and the morning’s murder. He left Tree alone and desolate but without anger. Tree knew Liam did what he planned and needed to do.

Ruminant pillows! Gregarious soft boulders! If one of you found a gap in a stone wall, the rest of you—rams, ewes, bucks, wethers, lambs; mothers and daughters, old grandfather-father, cousins and aunts, small bleating sons— followed onward, stupid as sheep, wherever your leader’s sheep-brain wandered to. My grandfather spent all day searching the valley and edges of Ragged Mountain, calling “Ke-day!” as if he brought you salt, “Ke-day! Ke-day!” *         *         * When the shirt wore out, and darns in the woolen shirt needed darning, a woman in a white collar cut the shirt into strips and braided it, as she braided her hair every morning. In a hundred years the knees of her great-granddaughter crawled on a rug made from the wool of sheep whose bones were mud, like the bones of the woman, who stares from an oval in the parlor. *         *         * I forked the brambly hay down to you in nineteen-fifty. I delved my hands deep in the winter grass of your hair. When the shearer cut to your nakedness in April and you dropped black eyes in shame, hiding in barnyard corners, unable to hide, I brought grain to raise your spirits, and ten thousand years wound us through pasture and hayfield together, threads of us woven together, three hundred generations from Africa’s hills to New Hampshire’s. *         *         * You were not shrewd like the pig. You were not strong like the horse. You were not brave like the rooster. Yet none of the others looked like a lump of granite that grew hair, and none of the others carried white fleece as soft as dandelion seed around a black face, and none of them sang such a flat and sociable song. *         *         * Now the black-faced sheep have wandered and will not return, even if I should search the valleys and call “Ke-day,” as if I brought them salt. Now the railroad draws a line of rust through the valley. Birch, pine, and maple lean from cellarholes and cover the dead pastures of Ragged Mountain except where machines make snow and cables pull money up hill, to slide back down. *         *         * At South Danbury Church twelve of us sit— cousins and aunts, sons— where the great-grandfathers of the forty-acre farms filled every pew. I look out the window at summer places, at Boston lawyers’ houses with swimming pools cunningly added to cowsheds, and we read an old poem aloud, about Israel’s sheep, old lumps of wool, and we read that the rich farmer, though he names his farm for himself, takes nothing into his grave; that even if people praise us, because we are successful, we will go under the ground to meet our ancestors collected there in the darkness; that we are all of us sheep, and death is our shepherd, and we die as the animals die.

When I see the cradle rocking What is it that I see? I see a rood on the hilltop Of Calvary. When I hear the cattle lowing What is it that they say? They say that shadows feasted At Tenebrae. When I know that the grave is empty, Absence eviscerates me, And I dwell in a cavernous, constant