Je Suis Charlie!

At the Pond's Edge - A Tribute to Donald Hall

This past week The Washington Post reviewed Donald Hall’s newly-published volume, Essays After Eighty.  At the age of 86 he describes himself inhabiting an “unknown, unanticipated galaxy” that is old age.  It has become, sadly, “a ceremony of losses” of lovers, family and friends, including fellow poet Galway Kinnell who passed away just a couple months ago (see my November 9, 2014 tribute).  Hall freely admits that at his age he feels complacent about death.  I am reminded of his poem “Affirmation,” the open line that reads: “To grow old is to lose everything.”  And after a litany of losses encountered throughout life, it ends with a pledge to “affirm that it is fitting / and delicious to lose everything” in the muddy edge of the pond that is life.  Another loss he recognizes yet without mourning is poetry.  After a rich poetic life, Hall believes poetry has abandoned him in old age.   He has felt it gradually sliding away.  “I had 60 years of it; I can’t regret it.”  Thankfully, his prose endures. 

So, as a tribute to Mr. Hall and in celebration of his most recent volume of essays, I am going to share with you one of my favorite of his poems, a poem about the poet and one of his readings.  “To a Waterfowl,” should not to be confused with a similarly titled and mostly forgotten poem by the American poet William Cullen Bryant first published in 1818.  Yet, perhaps like Bryant’s poem, Hall speaks to the idea of being alone in the world.  Even more so now in that “unanticipated galaxy” of his final years on earth, wondering about the direction that poetry has taken him.  “Poems are image-bursts from brain-depths, words flavored by buttery long vowels,” he writes. “The sound of poems is sensual, even sexual.”

TO A WATER FOWL

Women with hats like the rear ends of pink ducks
applauded you, my poems.
These are the women whose husbands I meet on airplanes,
who close briefcases and ask, “What are you in?”
I look in their eyes, I tell them I am in poetry,

and their eyes fill with anxiety, and with little tears.
“Oh, yeah?” they say, developing an interest in clouds.
“My wife, she likes that sort of thing?  Hah-hah?
I guess maybe I’d better watch my grammar, huh?”
I leave them in airports, watching their grammar,

and take a limousine to the Women’s Goodness Club
where I drink Harvey’s Bristol Cream with their wives,
and eat chicken salad with capers, with little tomato wedges,
and I read them “The Erotic Crocodile,” and “Eating You.”
Ah, when I have concluded the disbursement of sonorities,

crooning, “High on thy thigh I cry, Hi!” —and so forth—
they spank their wide hands, they smile like Jell-O,
and they say, “Hah-hah? My goodness, Mr. Hall,
but you certainly do have an imagination, huh?”
“Thank you, indeed,” I say; “it brings home the bacon.”

But now, my poems, now I have returned to the motel,
returned to l’eternel retour of the Holiday Inn,
naked, lying on the bed, watching Godzilla Sucks Mt. Fuji,
addressing my poems, feeling superior, and drinking bourbon
from a flask disguised to look like a transistor radio.

And what about you?  You, laughing?  You, in bluejeans,
laughing at your mother who wears hats, and at your father
who rides airplanes with a briefcase watching his grammar?
Will you ever be old and dumb, like your creepy parents?
Not you, not you, not you, not you, not you, not you.
__________

* "To a Waterfowl," published in The Town of Hill (1975)