Galway Kinnell passed away at his farm in Sheffield, Vermont on October 28th. He was 87. “The Stone Table” is one of Galway Kinnell’s most recent collected poems and contains imagery also found in The Book of Nightmares dating back over forty years to the early phase of his career as a poet. Unlike the despair pervading this earlier collection, the more recent poem exudes hope even as the poet realizes his career and life are approaching their eventual end. Describing “The Stone Table: “It feels very heavy. It is in bondage to narrative, familiar surfaces, and an expected outcome, a poem composed on earth,” in this instance, his farm in Sheffield, Vermont. The stone table becomes a resting place that later meditates on the poet Donald Hall's daily trips to Jane Kenyon's grave near their home in Wilmot, NH, and to its ironic epitaph. The stone table, at the poem’s conclusion, demonstrates the poet's own strong desire to remain fixed to earth. Sadly, Kinnell has flown free from us now, leaving us wanting. Hall survives.
THE STONE TABLE
Here on the hill behind the house,
we sit with our feet up on the edge
of the eight-by-ten stone slab
that was once the floor of the cow pass
that the cows used, getting from one pasture
to the other without setting a hoof
on the dirt road lying between them.
From here we can see the blackberry thicket,
the maple sapling the moose slashed
with his cutting teeth, turning it
scarlet too early, the bluebird boxes
flown from now, the one tree left
of the ancient orchard popped out
all over with saffron and rosy,
subacid pie apples, smaller crabs grafted
with scions of old varieties, Freedom,
Sops-of-Wine, Wolf River, and trees
we put in ourselves, dotted with red lumps.
We speak in whispers: fifty feet away,
under a red spruce, a yearling bear
lolls on its belly eating clover.
Abruptly it sits up. Did I touch my wine glass
to the table, setting it humming?
The bear peers about with the bleary undressedness
of old people who have mislaid their eyeglasses.
It ups its muzzle and sniffs. It fixes us,
whirls, and plunges into the woods—
a few cracklings and shatterings, and all is still.
As often happens, we find ourselves
thinking similar thoughts, this time of a friend
who lives to the south of that row of peaks
burnt yellow in the sunset. About now,
he will be paying his daily visit to her grave,
reading by heart the words, cut into black granite,
that she had written for him, when they
both thought he would die first:
I BELIEVE IN THE MIRACLES OF ART BUT WHAT
PRODIGY WILL KEEP YOU SAFE BESIDE ME.
Or is he back by now, in his half-empty house,
talking in ink to a piece of paper?
I, who so often used to wish to float free
of earth, now with all my being want to stay,
to climb with you on other evenings to this stone,
maybe finding a bear, or a coyote, like
the one who, at dusk, a week ago, passed
in his scissorish gait ten feet from where we sat—
this earth we attach ourselves to so fiercely,
like scions of Sheffield Seek-No-Furthers
grafted for our lifetimes onto paradise root-stock.
__________
* "The Stone Table," published in Strong Is our Hold (2006),
This is an excerpt from a posting to my blogspot - Looking Toward Portugal - on October 10, 2014. It was presented at the Iota Club & Cafe, in Arlington, Virginia, on the evening of October 12, 2014.
I am always keeping my eyes open for that first suggestion of autumn. I spend my summers in Maine, and come August, just three short months after the trees begin to leaf out in spring, there are always a few maples with branch tips beginning to flare red. It seems a bit curious to be swimming in a small lake while trees bordering its shores are already exhibiting the first flashes of color bespeaking the colder temperatures and cooling waters that can’t be that far off.
September is the month when one feels what Truman Capote called the “first ripple chills of autumn,” when the fall colors arrive in earnest in northern New England. The first to turn are the swampmaples and popple in low wet areas. Then come the various shades of reds, oranges and russet among the red and sugar maples, scarlet oak, and sumac; the ash trees’ deep purple; the yellows among the popple, birch and willows; and finally the more subtle tans and browns among the oak, beech, and sycamore. With these early chills the color increases almost daily in its proportions and brilliance. The leaf peepers also arrive around mid-month; they come, they look, and they are gone again by mid-October. They have little understanding of the full evolution of a northern New England autumn. It’s too bad they are unable or unwilling to experience its entire range and spectrum, from the onset of color as well as its evanescence. I honestly believe that autumn in no more colorful, nor more awe-inspiring than it is in these northern climes. For this reason alone I always try to postpone my annual trip south until after the autumn colors have reached their zenith.
With the onset of the killing frosts of October the season is better disposed to the arrival of winter. Cold rains will mute the colors, and as they fade, the leaves will quickly forsake the trees and fall to the ground much too soon. Not all of the leaves will fall, however. A few drained of their color will continue to flutter through the stiffening gusts of winter. No surrender. It is not uncommon for snow to fall by Halloween, first at the higher latitudes and elevations, but quickly enough snow is common place when November arrives. The leaves are raked against foundations for insulation as houses and out buildings are tucked up for the winter. The calendar may say it’s still autumn, but our senses tell us something different. Truly a touching end to the briefest and most poignant of seasons.
