Her Garden

(Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, American poets)

When they first met, Donald Hall was a published poet and a tenured professor and Jane Kenyon a college student. They were twenty years apart in age. After they married, they moved to Hall’s Eagle Pond Farm in New Hampshire, where they lived a quiet and happy life together. In their early days there, Hall said, “we worked on our poems, often in the same room . . . at close quarters because we had no heat except for the single woodstove, Jane and I occupying chairs on either side.”

And they helped and inspired each other in their work. “Boundaries helped. We belonged to different generations. Her first book of poems came out as I published my fifth. I could have been an inhibitor as easily as I was an encourager — if she had not been brave and stubborn.”

Then Kenyon was diagnosed with leukemia. As Hall helped her through the year-and-a-half of her fatal illness, he also wrote powerful lamentations.

Kenyon died in 1995, at the age of 47.

“After Jane died,” Hall said in an interview in 2006 following his appointment as U. S. Poet Laureate, “I wrote many poems of grief. For the first year, I wrote her letters. Later I wrote some poems in rhyme and meter. I had written poems in rhyme and meter when I was young, but most of my life I’ve written varieties of free verse. . . . I know whose poetry in particular was behind these poems, Thomas Hardy, who had a first marriage which ended in his wife’s death, whose marriage was very dissimilar to Jane’s and mine, but he wrote genuine and deeply moving poems of grief.”

HER GARDEN

I let her garden go.
let it go, let it go
How can I watch the hummingbird
Hover to sip
With its beak’s tip
The purple bee balm — whirring as we heard
It years ago?

The weeds rise rank and thick
let it go, let it go
Where annuals grew and burdock grows,
Where standing she
At once could see
The peony, the lily, and the rose
Rise over brick

She’d laid in patterns. Moss
let it go, let it go
Turns the bricks green, softening them
By the gray rocks
Where hollyhocks
That lofted while she lived, stem by tall stem,
Blossom with loss.

~ Donald Hall, born in 1928, American poet and essayist

Drawing from the Past

(How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My
Life by Arshille Gorky, 1904?-1948, Armenian-born
American painter)

One of my most cherished possessions is a page from a cookbook my mother had kept since she was a young woman. It includes a recipe for Rumtopf, or rum pot, printed in the old German fraktur font, with her underlinings of instructions she thought important.

The directions for this traditional German way of preserving fresh fruit are easy to follow. Around June, begin to gather the fruits of summer from local markets or farms, especially strawberries, raspberries, peaches, pears, and plums. Mangoes, grapes, kiwi, pineapple, and cherries are also good for this. Over the months, add the fruit, washed and chopped and peeled, if necessary, to a mixture of white sugar and the best dark rum. Store in a large glass container with a tight top, in a cool corner of the basement. By New Year’s, this ruby-red nectar will be just perfect to serve over pound cake or vanilla ice cream.

(There are only a few rules. Avoid bananas, the hard seeds of fruit, melons for their high water content, and blackberries, gooseberries, and rhubarb for their bitter taste. Check occasionally that the Rumtopf is kept cool; if fermentation does occur, you have to discard everything and start anew.)

DRAWING FROM THE PAST

Only Mama and I were at home.
We ate tomato sandwiches
with sweeps of mayonnaise
on indifferent white bread.

Surely it was September,
my older brother at school.
The tomatoes were fragrant
and richly red, perhaps the last before frost.

I was alert to the joy of eating
sandwiches alone with Mama, bare
feet braced on the underpinnings
of the abraded kitchen table.

Once, I’d made a mark in the wood
by pressing too hard as I traced
the outline of a horse.

I was no good at drawing — from life,
or from imagination. My brother
was good at it, and I was alert
to that, too.

~ Jane Kenyon (1947-1995), American poet

Happiness

(White Lilacs by Édouard Manet, 1832-1883,
French Realist and Impressionist painter)

Happiness, according to Aristotle, is the fulfillment of a thing’s nature.

It even comes “to the dog chewing a sock,” says the poet.

HAPPINESS

There's no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.

It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

~ Jane Kenyon (1947-1995), American poet

Philosophy in Warm Weather

(The Open Window by Pierre Bonnard,
1867-1947, French painter)

(August is the last full month of summer. It is still vacation time. We can linger to enjoy the birds, the bees, the flowers, the trees, all at their peak. We can also pause and meditate a little on the less material fruits of life.)

“Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, / Dust off the sun and moon and sing a song of cheer,” sang Nat “King” Cole (1919-1965).

PHILOSOPHY IN WARM WEATHER

Now all the doors and windows
are open, and we move so easily
through the rooms. Cats roll
on the sunny rugs, and a clumsy wasp
climbs the pane, pausing
to rub a leg over her head.

All around physical life reconvenes.
The molecules of our bodies must love
to exist: they whirl in circles
and seem to begrudge us nothing.
Heat, Horatio, heat makes them
put this antic disposition on!

This year’s brown spider
sways over the door as I come
and go. A single poppy shouts
from the far field, and the crow,
beyond alarm, goes right on
pulling up the corn.

~ Jane Kenyon (1947-1995), American poet

O Day of Mourning, part two

One can find peace in the quiet reminder that death is part of life.

LET EVENING COME

Let the light of late afternoon
shrine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

~ Jane Kenyon (1947-1995), American poet