Hall - The Back Chamber

Copyright 2011 by Donald Hall

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hall, Donald, date.
The back chamber : poems / Donald Hall.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-547-64585-8
I. Title.
PS 3515. A 3152 B 33 2011
811'.54dc22

Book design by Greta D. Sibley

Printed in the United States of America

DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Poems in this book previously appeared elsewhere: Agni, Amoskeag, The Atlantic Monthly ("Goosefeathers," "Alterations," "The Bone Ring," "Blue Snow"), Arrowsmith Press, Arts and Letters, The Nation, The New Yorker ("Love's Progress," "Maples," "Nymph and Shepherd," "Meatloaf" "The Things," "Green Farmhouse Chairs"), Onearth, Poetry ("Convergences," "Advent," "Closing"), The Threepenny Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Sewanee Review, and Warwick Press.

For Deanne Urmy
and
Wendy Strothman

When I walk in my house I see pictures,
bought long ago, framed and hanging
de Kooning, Arp, Laurencin, Henry Moore
that I've cherished and stared at for years,
yet my eyes keep returning to the masters
of the triviala white stone perfectly round,
tiny lead models of baseball players, a cowbell,
a broken great-grandmother's rocker,
a dead dog's toyvalueless, unforgettable
detritus that my children will throw away
as I did my mother's souvenirs of trips
with my dead father, Kodaks of kittens,
and bundles of cards from her mother Kate.

When love empties itself out,
it fills our bodies full.

For an hour we lie twining
pulse and skin together

like nurslings who sigh
and doze, dreamy with milk.

After their tumult, as they quieted,
She breathed into his ear
The tunes she loved to sing,
Measuring out the songs of Fred Astaire.
After she left, he slept
Deeply, except
To wake from a dream that brought back everything.

Now on the chest of drawers beside the bed
The candle stays unlit
That cast its flickering
Over her face as she sighed in wanton secret.
He cannot go to sleep,
Needing to keep
His ears tuned to the phone that does not ring.

Snow rises as high as my windows. Inside by the fire
my chair is warm, and I remain compounded of cold.

It is unthinkable that we will not touch each other again.

As the barn's bats swoop, vastation folds its wings
over my chest to enclose my rapid, impetuous heart.

It is ruinous that we will not touch each other again.

Ten miles away, snow falls on your clapboard house.
You play with your children in frozen meadows of snow.

We walked in a comfortless quiet
to sit on the shore of Union Lake
an hour in July, as light struck up
white-green from lilypads, motionless

in the steady sun of afternoon,
while loons uncannily wailed
at lake's end, and we watched
mallards drifting two by two.

We sat without speaking, until
the chainsaw rattle of a lightplane
ripped and concluded our silence.
"We'd better be going," she said.

We folded the plaid blanket,
picked up our things, and walked
to the clapboard house, not looking
at the lake we'd never go to again.

Oaks and red maple overhead
gathered as if to consume
our bodies and love into shadow.
There would be no more quarrels.

When you like a woman,
you talk and talk.
One night you kiss.
Another night you fuck.
You're both content,
maybe more than content.
Then she goes away.

When you like a woman,
you talk and talk.
One night you kiss.
Another night you fuck.
You're both content,
maybe more than content.
Then she goes away.

When you like a woman,
you talk and talk.
One night you kiss.
Another night you fuck.
You're both content,
maybe more than content.
Then she goes away.

She died a dozen times before I died,
And kept on dying, nymph of fatality.
I could not die but once although I tried.

I envied her. She whooped, she laughed, she cried
As she contrived each fresh mortality,
Numberless lethal times before I died.

I plunged, I plugged, I twisted, and I sighed
While she achieved death's paradise routinely.
I lagged however zealously I tried.

She writhed, she bucked, she rested, and, astride,
She posted, cantering on top of me
At least a hundred miles until I died.

I'd never blame you if you thought I lied
About her deadly prodigality.
She died a dozen times before I died
Who could not die so frequently. I tried.

We flew the Atlantic all night, your head
with its first streak of gray leaning
against my shoulder, and took a cab
to our bed-and-breakfast. We napped,
woke up at noon, and rode the tube
from Russell Square to Piccadilly Circus,
where we asked a stranger to take
a photograph of us standing together,
then walked for lunch to the Salisbury,
where in bomb-site London I drank
pints of Younger's before you were born.
Back at the hotel, we made love
as late light slipped through a gap
in the curtains onto your cheekbones,
your nose, your outstanding chin,
and your eyesdazed like a baby's
sleepy surfeited eyesthat closed
as you said in my ear, "I will lose you."

In a dream this August night in St. Petersburg,
I see the years lapse like Cyrillic letters
into the calm and receptive waters of the Neva.

When I was twelve years old in Connecticut,
helmeted soldiers sieging in acres of snow
surrounded Leningrad and the implacable Neva.

They warmed their hands and jackbooted feet
over the gold ashes of Catherine's Palace
inland from the former St. Petersburg's Neva.

Home from eighth grade I read in Life how trucks
slipped over frozen Lake Ladoga into the city
and starvation ebbed by the enduring Neva.

When ice melted in the scavenge of Leningrad,
no dogs or cats skittered into ravenous alleys
and squares of ruin beside the relentless Neva.

In St. Petersburg now, reconsecrated St. Isaac's
rises behind the magnanimity of the Hermitage
and boaters drink vodka on the summery Neva.

The Wehrmacht laid siege nine hundred days.
I dream that the years of wasted Leningrad
fall like Cyrillic script into the bounty of the Neva.

1. Twenty-five years ago, Kurt Schwitters,
I tried to instruct you in baseball
but kept getting distracted, gluing
bits and pieces of world history
alongside personal anecdote
instead of explicating baseball's
habits. I was K.C. (for Casey)
in stanzas of nine times nine times nine.
Last year the Sox were ahead by twelve

2. in May, by four in Augustcollapsed
as usualthen won the Series.
Jane Kenyon, who loved baseball, enjoyed
the game on TV but fell asleep
by the fifth inning. She died twelve years
ago, and thus would be sixty now,
watching baseball as her hair turned white.
I see her tending her hollyhocks,
gazing west at Eagle Pond, walking

3. to the porch favoring her right knee.
I live alone with baseball each night
but without poems. One of my friends
called "Baseball" almost poetry. No
more vowels carrying images
leap suddenly from my excited