Without

Poems

Donald Hall

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9780547971148
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

You might expect the fact of dying--the dying of a beloved wife and fellow poet--to make for a bleak and lonely tale. But Donald Hall's poignant and courageous poetry, facing that dread fact, involves us all: the magnificent, humorous, and gifted woman, Jane Kenyon, who suffered and died; the doctors and nurses who tried but failed to save her; the neighbors, friends, and relatives who grieved for her; the husband who sat by her while she lived and afterward sat in their house alone with his pain, self-pity, and fury; and those of us who till now had nothing to do with it. As Donald Hall writes, "Remembered happiness is agony; so is remembered agony." Without will touch every feeling reader, for everyone has suffered loss and requires the fellowship of elegy. In the earth's oldest poem, when Gilgamesh howls of the death of Enkidu, a grieving reader of our own time may feel a kinship, across the abyss of four thousand years, with a Sumerian king. In Without Donald Hall speaks to us all of grief, as a poet lamenting the death of a poet, as a husband mourning the loss of a wife. Without is Hall's greatest and most honorable achievement -- his give and testimony, his lament and his celebration of loss and of love.

Air Shatters in the
Car’s Small Room

Distracting myself

on the recliner between

Jane’s hospital bed

and window, in this blue

room where we endure,

I set syllables

into prosy lines.

William Butler Yeats

denounced with passion

"the poetry of

passive suffering.”

Friends and strangers

write letters speaking

of courage or strength.

What else could we do

except what we do?

Should we weep lying

flat? We do. Sometimes,

driving the Honda

with its windows closed

in beginning autumn

from the low motel

to Jane’s bed, I scream

and keep on screaming.

They flew all day across

the country to the hospital for hard cases.

The night before Jane

entered isolation in Seattle for chemo,

TBI, and a stranger’s

bone marrow—for life or death—they slept

together, as they understood,

maybe for the last time. His body

curved into Jane’s,

his knees tucked to the backs of her knees;

he pressed her warm soft thighs,

back, waist, and rump, making the spoons,

and the spoons clattered

with a sound like the end man’s bones.

As they killed her bone

marrow again, she lay on a gurney

alone in a leaden

room between machines that resembled

pot-bellied stoves

which spewed out Total Body Irradiation

for eleven half-hour

sessions measured over four days.

It was as if she capped

the Chernobyl pile with her body.

The courier brought

bone marrow in an insulated bottle

from the donor, a nameless

thirty-nine-year-old female who

sent along words

“To the Recipient.” Jane’s

“For the Donor” flew back

somewhere, where a stranger lay flat

with an anesthetic

hangover and pelvic bones that ached—

and with disinterested

love, which is the greatest of these.

Jane lay silent on her back

as pink liquid leached through a tube

from a six-inch-square

plastic envelope. It was Day Zero.

By Day Eleven, mucositis

from the burn of Total Body Irradiation

frayed her mouth apart

cell by cell, peeling her lips and tongue.

To enter her antibiotic

cube, it took him fifteen minutes

to suit up, wearing a wide

paper hat, yellow mask, long white

booties like a Dallas

Cowgirl, blue paper surgical gown,

and sterile latex gloves.

Jane said he looked like a huge condom.

He woke at five, brewed

coffee, swallowed pills, injected insulin,

shaved, ate breakfast, packed

the tote with Jane’s sweats he washed

at night, filled the thermos,

and left the apartment on Spring Street

to walk a block and a half

to the hospital’s bone marrow floor.

Waiting for the light

to cross the avenue, briefly he imagined

throwing himself in front

of that bus. He knew he wouldn’t.

Discharged at last,

she returned to sleep with him again

in the flat jerry-built

for bald tenants and their caregivers.

He counted out meds

and programmed pumps to deliver

hydration, TPN,

and ganciclovir. He needed to learn

...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Her Long Illness
• “A Beard for a Blue Pantry”
• Song for Lucy
• The Porcelain Couple
• The Ship Pounding
• Air Shatters in the Car’s Small Room
• Blues for Polly
• Last Days
• Without
• The Gallery
• Letter with No Address
• Independence Day Letter
• Letter from Washington
• Midsummer Letter
• Letter in Autumn
• Letter at Christmas
• Letter in the New Year
• Postcard: January 22nd
• Midwinter Letter
• Letter after a Year
• Weeds and Peonies
• Read More from Donald Hall
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH