HALL, Donald
September Ode
.....
The tree is burning on the autumn noon
That builds each year the leaf and bark again.
Though frost will strip it raw and barren soon,
The rounding season will restore and mend.
Yet people are not mended, but go on,
Accumulating memory and love.
And so the wood we used to know is gone,
Because the years have taught us that we move.
We have moved on, the Tamburlaines of then,
To different Asias of our plundering.
And though we sorrow not to know again
A land or face we loved, yet we are king.
The young are never robbed of innocence
But given gold of love and memory.
We live in wealth whose bounds exceed our sense,
And when we die are full of memory.
.....
Affirmation
To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.
The Corner
It does not know its name.
It sits in a damp corner,
spit hanging
from its chin, odor of urine
puddled around.
Huge, hairless, grunting,
it plays with itself,
sleeps, stares for hours,
and leaps
to smash itself on the wall.
Limping, bloody, falling back
into the corner, it
will not die.