Poets Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon shared a life, a love, and in their latter days together, also an illness. Hall writes of his wife’s Leukemia, of her death, and of his grief in the poems and letters of “Without” and “ The Painted Bed.”

Jane Kenyon was nineteen years younger than me. I have had some bad illnesses. We never dreamed that this might happen and you have heard other people say similar things. We almost did not get married because she was going to be a widow according to the actuaries for about twenty- five years. I am glad we took a chance. We had twenty- three years together. She contracted Leukemia in January of 1994. She died in April of 1995. In the meantime, we spent a great deal of time at Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital in New Hampshire. We also had gone out to the Hutchinson in Seattle, Washington where Jane had a bone marrow transplant, which was her one hope to survive this Leukemia. Then, six months after the transplant, the Leukemia returned, and there was nothing more to do.

I am giving you a little outline here for what I read. I am going to begin by reading poems from “Without” and I am going to begin by reading poems out of the illness and I will conclude by reading poems written after death.
There is a long sequence of anecdotal medical poems under the general title of “Her Long Illness”. In this section, I refer to Jane, but I also refer to myself as he and him. I recently wrote it with I, Jane and I, because I am writing them and I know what I feel. There were forests of I (s) everywhere. One of my early readers suggested that I try he and I really prefer it. It is the same thing, but it takes a little focus away. That capital letter is so dominant. It can be.

This is a little poem from the early stages in the illness, working for a remission, not necessarily a temporary remission.

Daybreak until nightfall, he sat by his wife at the hospital while chemotherapy dripped through the catheter into her heart. He drank coffee and read the Globe. He paced. He worked on poems. He rubbed her back and read aloud. Overcome with dread, they wept and affirmed their love for each other, witlessly over and over again. When it snowed one morning, Jane gazed at the darkness, blurred by flakes. They pushed the IV pump, which she called Igor. She slowly passed the nurse’s pods as far as the outside door so that she could she could smell the snowy air.

I always mispronounce Igor here because Jane did because Mel Brooks did. He was our favorite Master of Cinema, and in Young Frankenstein, there is a character who is called Igor, spelled Egore. There are many, many of these poems. There were about two hundred of them and it has been cut down to about thirty or so here. But, I am going to just read a few flavor of the time and this tiny one is just direct quotation from Jane, home from the hospital after remission waiting for further chemotherapy.

Oh, I have to say that we had a dog that we adored named Gus (Gussie). This morning, Gussie woke me up. I let him out. I fed Ada. I took Gus back in again and fed him. Then I went to the bathroom to pee and I saw myself in the mirror. I had forgotten the bald woman with Leukemia who stared back at me.

About two months after the diagnosis, we had a wedding anniversary. Alone together for a moment on the twenty-second anniversary of their wedding, he clasped her as she stood at the sink, pressing into her backside rubbing his cheek against the stubble of her skull. He gave her a ring of pink stones with nine small diamonds around it. She put it on her finger and immediately named it please don’t die. They kissed and Jane whispered to him in Latin. We did not normally chatter in Latin. We were not chattering in Latin. She was repeating the refrain line from a poem by a great Scots poet William Dunmare, 17th Century I think or maybe late 16th Century where he laments the makers. He grieves over the dead and dying poets of Scotland who are many and at the end of each stanza, he puts the Latin line for the fear of death shakes me like a rat.

My poems are those of a caregiver also. He hovered beside Jane’s bed solicitous. What can I do? It must have been insufferable while she suffered her private hurts to see his worried face looming above her always anxious to do something when there was exactly nothing to do. Inside him, some four year old understood that if he was good, thoughtful, considerate, beyond reproach, perfect, then she would not leave him.

The next poem departs from the he/Jane bit. It is a separate poem. It is a poem about hospital life, the daily life/routine where we spent a great deal of our last fifteen months together. It is called “The Ship Pounding”.

Each morning I made my way among gangways, elevators, and nurse’s pods to Jane’s room to interrogate the grave helpers who tended her through the night while the ship’s massive engines kept its propellers turning. Week after week, I sat by her bed with black coffee and the Globe. The passengers on this voyage wore masks or dangled devices that dripped chemicals into their wrists. I believed that the ship traveled to a harbor of breakfast, work and love. I wrote, when the infusions are infused entirely, bone marrow restored and lymphoblasts remitted, I will take my wife, bald as Michael Jordan back to our dog and day.

Today, months later at home, these words turned up on my desk as I listened in case Jane called for help or spoke in delirium ready to make the agitated drive to Emergency again for readmission to the huge vessel that heaves water month after month without leaving port, without moving a knot, without arrival or destination, its great engines pounding.

When Jane and I went to Seattle and she had her bone marrow transplant, she was at first in a room, where she lived in a sizeable room that was totally cocooned from the rest, totally sterile and to go into her side of the bed, you had to dress up in sterile clothing. There was a great protocol for how you put it on so that you did not leave any germy exteriors there. It was just after that, this poem takes place just after the bone marrow transplant when the treatment before it, the out of body radiation, the chemotherapy, had inflicted terrible pain.

By day eleven, effects from the burn of total body radiation frayed her mouth apart cell by cell, peeling her lips and tongue. To enter her antibiotic cube, it took him fifteen minutes to suit up wearing a wide paper hat, yellow mask, long, white booties like a Dallas Cowgirl, blue paper surgical gown and sterile latex gloves. Jane said he looked like a huge condom. She tried to cheer me up you know.

I go now to the last time we, after returning to New Hampshire with the new marrow working, we were hopeful. But, we also knew that the Leukemia could come back any time it wanted. After a few months it did and we had eleven days. Jane had eleven days and we worked together on her posthumous new and selected poems. We wrote her obituary together. It was incredible behavior, twenty-three years of marriage. We went to our twenty-third wedding anniversary during those eleven days and I kept trying to think and plan about everything. So, this is one instance.

Still, he could not stop planning. That night he woke up with, when Gus dies, I will have him cremated and scatter his ashes on your grave. She laughed and her big eyes quickened and she nodded, it will be good for the daffodils. She laid back on the flowered pillow. Perkins, how do you think of these things? She called me Perkins. It was her pet name. We laughed twice during those eleven days. That was one of them.

There was a poem that I wrote originally while she was alive. It was the title poem, “Without”, about the landscape of Leukemia. It is the landscape of living inside this disease. After she died, when I was assembling this book, I realized that it was best at the end of her life using past tense. This is the title poem, “Without”. In it, this is one of, I guess it is the only poem I have in print where I have written without punctuation and without much coherent syntax. It is hurdling around trying to make with the form, especially with the poem, some sense of what it was like.
We lived in a small island stone nation without color under gray clouds and wind distant the unlimited ocean, acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia without seagulls or palm trees without vegetation or animal life only barnacles and lead colored moss that darkened when months did.

H ours days weeks months weeks days hours the year endured without punctuation February without ice winter sleet snow melted recovered but nothing without thaw although cold streams hurdled no snowdrop or crocus rose, no yellow no red leaves of maple without October no spring no summer no autumn no winter no rain no peony thunder no wood thrush the book was a thousand pages without commas without mice oak leaves wind storms no castles no plazas no flags no parrots without carnival or the procession of relics intolerable without brackets or colons silence without color sound without smell without apples without pork to rupture gnash unpunctuated without churches uninterrupted no orioles ginger noses no opera no without fingers daffodils cheekbones the body was a nation a tribe dug into stone assaulted white blood broken to shards provinces invaded, bombed shot shelled artillery sniper fire helicopter gun ship grenade burning murder land mine starvation the cease fire lasted forty-eight hours then a shell exploded in a market pain vomit neuropathy morphine nightmare, confusion, the rack, terror, the vise vincristine ara -C cytoxan vp16 loss of memory loss of language losses pneumocystis carinii pneumonia bactrim foamless unmitigated sea without sea delirium, whipmarks of petechiae multiple blisters of herpes zoster and how are you doing today I am doing one afternoon say the sun came out moss took on greenishness leaves fell the market opened a loaf of bread a sparrow a bony dog wandered back sniffing a lath it might be possible to take up a pencil unwritten stanzas taken up and touched beautiful terrible sentences unuttered
the sea unrelenting wave gray the sea flotsam without islands broken crates block after block the same house the mall no cathedral no hobo jungle the same women and men they longed to drink hayfields no without dog or semicolon or village square without monkey or lily without garlic.

I am going to read next the poem that actually ends “Without”. It is the first poem I started after her death. I had been writing all the time she was sick and while she was dying. I was taking notes. Everything was revised and cut down. But, for a month or so after her death, I did not write. Then, I began this poem. It took me quite a while to finish, but she was a great gardener Jane was. You will hear about that in another poem too and gardening was maybe second behind poetry in things that she loved to do and was totally absorbed and devoted to. She died in April and the Daffodils were already coming up. Then, the tulips and the lilies came. It is called Weeds and Peonies.

Your peonies burst out, white as snow squalls, with red flecks at their shaggy centers in your border of prodigies by the porch. I carry one magnanimous blossom indoors and float it in a glass bowl as you used to do. Ordinary pleasures, contentment recollected, blow like snow into the abandoned garden, overcoming the daisies. Your blue coat vanishes down Pond Road into imagined snowflakes with Gus at your side, his great tail swinging, but you will not reappear, tired and satisfied, and grief’s repeated particles suffuse the air like the dog yipping through the entire night or the cat stretching awake, then curling as if to dream of her mother’s milky nipples. A raccoon dislodges a geranium from its pot. Flowers, roots and dirt lay upended in the back garden where lilies begin their daily excursions above stone walls in the season of old roses. I pace beside weeds and snowy peonies, staring at Mount Kearsarge where you climbed wearing purple hiking boots. Hurry back, be careful climbing down. Your peonies lean their vast heads westward as if they might topple. Some topple.

Whenever I read it, I remember a particular change, the last one. It was not a serious revision, but an important change. I have to tell you about it. At the end of the first stanza, I talk about me bringing inside a peony to float it in a bowl. I say and float it in a glass bowl like you used to do. The way I wrote it up until the very last minute, up until the newspaper editor friend of mine talked to me about it, it was I carry one magnanimous blossom indoors to float in a glass bowl as you used to do. My friend said I keep seeing Jane floating in this enormous bowl. I was grateful.

Shortly after beginning that poem, I started to write Jane a letter. I wrote her letters for a year. The last half of “Without” is mostly the letters that I wrote her after her death. Plenty of people have written letters to the dead and it is easy to know or remember in many cases how it begins. Something happens, a little bit of news and you think immediately, Oh, I have to tell, no, wait a minute. You know, I can’t. So, I set out to do it. I wrote her poems and in these poems, she was still you. I was addressing her. In the poems of later years, she was no longer you. I am going to read the last of these. This is “Letter After A Year”. I speak of Gus and Ada whom you have already met and she calls me Perkins and you already know about that. There are also the names of people that you are not supposed to recognize, but you recognize they are friends. They are acquaintances, whatever. I think the context will tell you. But, when you write a letter to somebody, you don’t say Alice, who is your best friend, says….I was writing a letter as it were.

Here is a story I never told you. Living in a rented house on South University in Ann Arbor, long before we met, I found bundled letters in the attic room where I took myself to work. A young woman tenant of the attic wrote these letters to her lover who had died in a plane crash. In my thirtieth year with tenure and a new book coming out, I read the letters in puzzlement. She is writing these letters to somebody dead? There is one good thing about April. Everyday, Gus and I take a walk in the graveyard. I am the one who doesn’t piss on your stone. Oh, winter when snow and ice kept me away. I worried that you missed me. Perkins, where the hell are you? In hell; Everyday, I play in repertoire the same script without you, without love, without audience except for Gus who waits attentive for cues like a walk, a biscuit, bedtime. The year of days without you in your body swept by as quick as an afternoon. But, each afternoon took a year. At first, and most outright, I daydreamed about burning the house, kerosene and pie plates with a candle lit in the middle. I locked myself in your study with Gus, Ada and the rifle my father gave me at twelve. I killed our cat and our dog and swallowed a bottle of pills knowing that if I woke up on fire, I had the gun. After you died, I stopped rereading history. I took up Cormick McCarthy for the rage and murder. Now, I return to Gibbon, secure in his reasonable civilization, he exercises detachment as Barbarians skewer Romans. Then, Hans galloped from the sunrise wearing skulls. What’s new? I see more people now. In March, I took Kate and Mary to Pierre’s. At the end of the month, ice dropped to the pond’s bottom and water flashed and flowed through pines in Western light. The year melted in to April and I lived through the hour we learned last year that you would die. For the next ten days, my mind sat by our bed again as you diminished cell by cell. Last week, the goldfinches flew back for a second spring. Again, I witnessed snowdrops worry from dead leaves into air. Now, your hillside daffodils edge up and today, it is a year since we set you down at the border of the graveyard on a breezy April day. We stood in a circle around the coffin and its hole under pines and birches to lower you into the glacial sand. When I dream, sometimes your hair is long and we make love like we used to. One nap time, I saw your face at eighty with many lines, more flesh, the good bones distinct. It is astonishing to be old. When I stand after sitting, I am shocked at how I must stretch to ease the stiffness out. When we first spoke of marriage, we dismissed the notion because you would be a widow twenty-five years or maybe I would not be able to make love while desire still flared in you. Sometimes now, I feel crazy with desire again as if I were forty, drinking and just divorced. Ruth Houghton had a stroke. Our daughter sent me the album of the photographs Roger took in his documentary “Passion”. Inside and outside our house, every room, every corner, one day in September 1984, I howled as I gazed at that day intact. Our furniture looked out of place as if vandals had shoved everything awry. There were pictures on the walls we put away long ago. The kitchen wallpaper shone bright red in Roger’s kodacolor. It faded as we watched, not seeing it fade.

I am going to read some poems from “The Painted Bed”. It is the more recent book in which there are many poems of grieving. This one is called “Ardor”.

Nursing her I felt alive in the animal moment, scenting the predator. Her death was the worst thing that could happen and caring for her was the best.

After she died, I screamed, upsetting the depressed dog who brought me her blue sneaker. Now in the third vanished year, I no longer address the wall covered with many photographs or call her “you” in a poem. She recedes into the granite museum of JANE KENYON 1947-1995.

I long for the absent woman of different faces who makes metaphors and chops garlic, drinking a glass of Chardonnay, oiling the wok, humming to herself, maybe thinking how to conclude a poem. When I make love now, something is awry. Last autumn, a woman said, “I mistrust your ardor.”

This winter in Florida I loathed the old couples my age who promenaded in their slack flesh and held hands. I gazed at young women with desire and outrage – unable to love or work, to stay home or travel, to die or live.
Hours are slow and weeks rapid in their vacancy. Each day lapses as I recite my complaints. Lust is grief that has turned over in bed to look the other way.

Finally, I am going to read another poem. It is called “Distressed Haiku.” It is a series of little things somewhat resembling Haiku, not symbolically, but in the structure.
In a week or ten days, the snow and ice will melt from this cemetery road. I am coming. Don’t move. You think that dying is the worst thing that could happen. Then they stay dead.

Will Hall ever write anything but lines that whine and complain? In April, the blue mountain revises from white toward Green. The mouse rips the throat of the lion. The Boston Red Sox win 100 straight games and the Dead return.
Thank you.