“Poetry
offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second
favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion
and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do
this by the means of their beauty of language.”
– Donald Hall
Hall – onetime Poet Laureate of the
U.S. – was a prolific, award-winning man of letters widely admired for his
sharp humor and painful candor about nature, mortality, baseball and the
distant past. Author of 50 books,
including 22 books of verse, Hall died this week at age 89.
For Saturday’s Poem, here is Hall’s
An Old Life
Snow fell in the night.
At five-fifteen I woke to a bluish
mounded softness where
the Honda was. Cat fed and coffee made,
I broomed snow off the car
and drove to the Kearsarge Mini-Mart
before Amy opened
to yank my Globe out of the bundle.
Back, I set my cup of coffee
beside Jane, still half-asleep,
murmuring stuporous
thanks in the aquamarine morning.
Then I sat in my blue chair
with blueberry bagels and strong
black coffee reading news,
the obits, the comics, and the sports.
Carrying my cup twenty feet,
I sat myself at the desk
for this day's lifelong
engagement with the one task and desire.
At five-fifteen I woke to a bluish
mounded softness where
the Honda was. Cat fed and coffee made,
I broomed snow off the car
and drove to the Kearsarge Mini-Mart
before Amy opened
to yank my Globe out of the bundle.
Back, I set my cup of coffee
beside Jane, still half-asleep,
murmuring stuporous
thanks in the aquamarine morning.
Then I sat in my blue chair
with blueberry bagels and strong
black coffee reading news,
the obits, the comics, and the sports.
Carrying my cup twenty feet,
I sat myself at the desk
for this day's lifelong
engagement with the one task and desire.
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