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Comments Posted 12.28.11 | PERMALINK | PRINT

Snow Farm in Dublin New Hampshire. Keene Public Library and the Historical Society of Cheshire County.

1. In the back chamber, discarded things
of family jumble together,
nothing thrown away since we moved here
in eighteen sixty-five. I foresee
an auction of broken rocking chairs
painted farmhouse green, thick wooden skis,
oil lamps, my great-grandfather’s flannel
nightshirts, stacks of Youth’s Companion, lasts
for resoling shoes, toys, eight stacked beds…

2. I know you don’t listen, Kurt Schwitters,
but pitchers and catchers drive their cars
south in February, while Fenway’s
baseball lies under snow. You collect
yourself in the framed, deep-set collage
Linda and I discovered at Yale.
Idolatrous of this white farmhouse
since I was ten, in my ninth decade
I daydream that it burns to the ground

3. so that nobody will empty it.
My children comfort me with their care,
bringing five grandchildren to visit,
but none will settle in the country.
When I was twelve and we didn’t hay,
Kurt, the parlor radio broadcast
the Red Sox games. As Henry Moore carved
or modelled his sculpture every day,
he strove to surpass Donatello

4. and failed, but woke the next morning
elated for another try. At
eighty-five he dozed in a wheelchair.
I list the objects of this long house,
walking from room to room taking notes,
as if I controlled or determined
what happens to things after I die.
In June the peonies go rotten
and white old roses flourish briefly.

5. This wooden box beside my blue chair
was built by a cabinetmaker
to hold the toys of his first grandson,
my father, who died at fifty-two.
Inside it are LPs of poets,
dead and reading their work with gusto.
Let them melt. Baseball will inflate, Kurt,
into yearlong seasons under domes.
My mother made it until ninety.

6. All day I sit silent and alone
watching the barn or TV baseball,
usually grateful for the hours
of isolation’s slow contentment —
but I long for days when Linda comes.
I ask, ‘What will you do when I die?”
Iwill sit in a chair for two years.”
My grandchildren’s grandchildren will know
nothing of a grassy cellar hole.

7. Linda gave me the book “Kurt Schwitters,”
with murky photos from the twenties
of your Merzbaus, and ten collages
footnoted as “whereabouts unknown.”
Hitler’s war and our bombing wasted
Hamburg, where your rash and bountiful
inventions burned into ash. I think
of the lost Red Sox I read about
in the Boston Post: Babe Ruth long gone,

8. Ted Williams, Mel Parnell, Bobby Doerr,
Birdie Tebbetts … My wife Jane Kenyon
died at forty-seven, no longer
able to write. I imagine her
at sixty, outliving hot flashes,
writing in depression new poems
about an old man who cannot fuck.
She looks after him as he shuffles
into a bent and shrivelled other.

9. Like all shelters, Kurt — huts and mansions —
this house built two centuries ago
contained its end in its beginning,
in its anvil-forged spikes and timbers.
Benjamin Keneston, Aunt Nannie,
and Wesley Wells are dead. After hours
of Cheyne-Stokes breathing they went silent,
as useless and beyond self-pity
as broken rocking chairs painted green.


“Green Farmhouse Chairs” from The Back Chamber by Donald Hall. Copyright © 2011 by Donald Hall. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Read more poems here. 

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