by Donald Hall
My strong son helped me outside and into the car. The meticulous driver drove us an hour and a half home. I had stayed awake and vibrant after midnight for the first time in so many years. I knew that I would turn eighty-eight in September, and that on October 1 I would attend Allison’s wedding.
That was late April. Early in May the composer Herschel Garfein produced a concert of my poems, sung by a tenor with a pianist. My children could come, and Kendel and Pam—the concert hall only a few miles from my house—together with a hundred friends and strangers. Before we heard the poems sung, I read them aloud. A tenor and a pianist made their art. Afterward I answered questions. For decades I had traveled coast to coast and abroad to read my poems and later to answer questions, to talk and joke with my listeners. I loved doing it again, even if only for twenty minutes. In the morning Philippa telephoned in joy: “You were funny!”
Tree Day
My big tree fell down, the 150-year-old rock maple in my front yard. When I came here at age nine or ten, in the 1930s, my grandfather hung ropes from it to make me a swing, and I pumped hard to lie flat out on the air. Forty years later, when Jane and I moved here to stay, maple branches hovered hugely over the porch, shading the house all summer. The big tree aged as I did, and one great wing of it died five years ago. I hired it sawed off and carted away, and each spring watched to see if the remaining branches put out new leaves. Even this April they budded a frail green. Ten feet off the ground a patch of the trunk had gone rotten, and in the rot raspberries grew. In the summer’s drought I looked for a bear with a sweet tooth to drop by midday.
My driveway is U-shaped, and the big old tree grew in the middle. I hoped the maple might outlive me. I feared that it might fall onto my old house where disabilities creep me from room to room. It was late in July that a monumental wind took the tree down, its great length lapsing away from the house into a hayfield. I did not hear it fall. What would be the noise of green leaves and old branches falling on summer grass? In the late light of afternoon I saw its long body snapped off at the raspberries ten feet above the ground, its green fragile wreckage stretched out wriggling in the wind that persisted.
It was a bad day for trees in the neighborhood. Timber workers offered their services, and rang my assistant Kendel’s doorbell or left a note at my door. Three men who live two miles away offered to do the job, in the hours after their regular workdays ended. Rick Maines helped tend our fields when Jane was alive, and he would get help from his brothers-in-law Brian and Gordon Ordway. (Rick had married the Ordways’ sister, Linda—who died young years ago, at thirty-seven, a decade younger than Jane.) The Ordways and I are connected way back. When I was a child here in the summers, I sat in my family pew at church in front of the Ordway family, including a boy my age who became Brian and Gordon’s father. Every Sunday morning, late 1930s into the ’40s, their boy-father sat behind me among his brothers and sisters. He died a few years ago. I remember his brother Perley, who remains alive at ninety-three.
Now the three men worked from 4 p.m. into darkness, sawing and cutting branches and stacking them for the dump. I watched them knock the stump down, its ten stout feet, sawing it almost through at the bottom, then pushing it over with a big-wheeled tractor. When it was too dark to work they left a pile of wood behind, and picked it up the next afternoon before they raked my lawn and driveway clean. They charged little. There are some businesses in my town, including the best car repair shop, that charge as much as the United States does. The Ordways came up with a New Hampshire figure.
One more story derives from the demise of my tree. The tree blew down in July, and of course nobody knows when my granddaughter Allison and her husband Will will move into this old house, extending one family’s residence since 1865. They will take over here when I die, but now I was able, with the help of a windstorm, to give them a wedding present that should last awhile. When I was a boy, elms lined Route 4, but by the time Jane and I arrived, Dutch elm disease had killed them all. A few years ago, Philippa told me of newly bred elms that were immune. She and I conspired, and acting as my agent, she bought a new American elm, and after the great stump was removed a slim four-foot elm sapling took the maple’s place. Philippa and Jerry, my son-in-law, planted it on a Sunday early in September while Allison and Will and I looked on. It was Tree Day, which I proclaim a family holiday. For now the elm will require watering, three doses of three gallons a week, applied by my helpers. The sapling came with a bronze plaque inscribed to the future tenants, to be affixed to the elm’s eventual trunk. I am free to imagine another grandchild swinging from another branch of another tree.
Acknowledgments
“Necropoetics” (as “The Poetry of Death”) and “Solitude Double Solitude” (as “Between Solitude and Loneliness”) appeared in The New Yorker online. The latter was also in Rigas Laiks (Latvia); it also published “Losing My Teeth,” which also appeared in 80 Things to Do When You Turn 80. The three lines in “The Last Poem” were published in the Concord Monitor and the Boston Globe. “The Wild Heifers” introduced a reprint of String Too Short to Be Saved. “Richard Wilbur” appeared in Poetry, and “Prosaic Laureates” in the American Poetry Review. Mudfish printed “Fucking” and “Mudfish Pissing.” Anecdotes from “Theodore Roethke” turn up in the introduction to a paperback reprint of The Glass House, a biography by Allan Seager (University of Michigan Press).
“Like Musical Instruments . . .” is reprinted by permission from Light and Shade (Coffee House Press, 2006). Copyright © 2006 by Tom Clark. “My Son My Executioner,” “Ox-Cart Man,” and “Weeds and Peonies” from White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems, 1946–2006 by Donald Hall. Copyright © 2006 by Donald Hall. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. “Pissing Beside Donald Hall” from Mudfish #17, © 2012 Box Turtle Press, New York, NY. Jane Kenyon, “Twilight: After Haying” and excerpts from “Pharaoh” and “Otherwise” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2005 by The Estate of Jane Kenyon. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org. Excerpt from “Tywater” from The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems by Richard Wilbur. Copyright 1947, renewed © 1972 by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Photograph on page 42: Stephen Blos 1974. Illustration on page 192 reproduced courtesy of http://hddfm.com/clip-art/baseball-clipart-free.html.
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About the Author
Donald Hall, who served as poet laureate of the United States from 2006 to 2007, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts, awarded by President Obama. He lives in New Hampshire.
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