Remembering Jane

Donald Hall's poems of agony and love for his lost wife, the poet Jane Kenyon

Author: By Liz Rosenberg

Date: SUNDAY, April 26, 1998

Page: L1

Section: Books

. . . At noon I lay down

with my mate. It might

have been otherwise.

We ate dinner together

at a table with silver

candlesticks. It might

have been otherwise.

I slept in a bed

in a room with paintings

on the walls, and

planned another day

just like this day.

But one day, I know,

it will be otherwise.

But in April 1995, it was Kenyon who died, at age 48, after 15 months of struggle with leukemia. ``Without,'' Donald Hall's 14th collection of poetry, records that struggle and its aftermath. It is a remarkably beautiful and generous book, beautiful in all its terrible specifics of the daily ordeal of death, and generous to the memory of the force of life his wife possessed. The result, I think, is his strongest book yet.

Hall -- author of plays, children's books, and essays, editor of anthologies -- has worked for many years to attain a style of his own, his own considerable bag of tricks; in ``Without'' he casts them to the four winds: or, to be more accurate, he uses his voice as the wind blown through an instrument shaped by his late wife's presence. It does not stop being Hall's voice, exactly. It does not become Kenyon's voice, precisely. But the music is both complicated and purified by his effort to be true: true to facts and feelings.

The facts are often dismal and mundane. One can feel Hall hunkering down, recording the dailiness, the ordinary, grinding miracle of life and death that goes on in each hospital, day and night. One vows never to forget this other life, and yet one does forget it. But Hall has not forgotten:

. . . Week after week, I sat by her bed

with black coffee and the Globe.

The passengers on this voyage

wore masks or cannulae

or dangled devices that dripped

chemicals into their wrists.

I believed that the ship

traveled to a harbor

of breakfast, work, and love.

. . . the huge

vessel that heaves water month

after month, without leaving

port, without moving a knot,

without arrival or destination,

its great engines pounding.

As Kenyon never looked away from the huge, fantastic fact of her dying, so Hall refuses to blink, even at the moment of death:

In the last hours, she kept

her forearms raised with pale fingers clenched

at cheek level, like

the goddess figurine over the bathroom sink.

Sometimes her right fist flicked

or spasmed toward her face. For twelve hours

until she died, he kept

scratching Jane Kenyon's big bony nose.

A sharp, almost sweet

smell began to rise from her open mouth.

He watched her chest go still.

With his thumb he closed her round brown eyes.

My husband put down this book because he found it unbearably sad. I read it, reread it, and read it a third time because to me the book is equally a celebration of life. One feels the strong undertow that pulls Hall back against his will to the land of the living. ``I walk by Eagle Pond with the dog, / wearing my leather coat / against the clear early chill. / looking at water lilies that clutch/ cool yellow fists together.'' One cannot go on forever hating the world one's darling so dearly loved:

When you died

in April, baseball took up

its cadences again

under the indoor ballpark's

patched and recovered ceiling.

You would have admired

the Mariners, still hanging on

in October, like blue asters

surviving frost.

Sometimes

when I start to cry,

I wave it off: ``I just

did that.'' . . .

While ``Without'' is tragic, it is not unrelentingly grim. Black comedy abounds on hospital wards, as every medical worker knows:

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.

And of course, the book is full of Jane. Hall has done for Kenyon's work and rhythms what Emily Dickinson did with the plain song hymn: He gives himself over to all the possibilities inherent in her life, her voice, her rhythms, her vocabulary: ``He gave her a ring / of pink tourmaline / 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, `Timor mortis conturbat me.' ''

Every day I look at the words

cut into stone, which you wrote

when I was supposed to die:

I BELIEVE IN THE MIRACLES OF ART BUT WHAT

PRODIGY WILL KEEP YOU SAFE BESIDE ME

This is not to say that ``Without'' is the world of a saint, about the life and death of an angel. Donald Hall, like all survivors, is self-excoriating. He accuses himself of cowardice and ingratitude, ``Why were they not / contented, four months ago, because / Jane did not have / leukemia? A year hence, would he question / why he was not contented / now? Therefore he was contented.'' He bargains, sings hymms of praise or hope; then the mood shifts or the weather changes and he howls like a dog without its master: ``no spring no summer no autumn no winter / no rain no peony thunder no woodthrush / the book was a thousand pages without commas.'' He paints a portrait of those who fall, gather themselves up again, fall again:

Should we keep lying

flat? We do. Sometimes,

driving the Honda

with its windows closed

in beginning autumn

from the low motel

to Jane's bed, I scream

and keep screaming.

Despite the accuracy of the title, ``Without'' is a rich and abundant book. A friend recently quoted to me her rabbi's word's at a child's funeral: There would not be such grief if there had not been so much joy. Hall's book is full of poetry -- this would have pleased his wife very much. That it was full of a poetry that celebrates and echoes and shades and remembers her makes it all the more a work of art, love, and generous genius. ``Without'' is not an easy testament, but a mighty one.