I'm reading The Freedom Manifesto, AS. I hear you, it's good and the author cracks me up. He's such a loser! Just like me.

Speaking of that, I have lost 3 library books this month. So, this one, the first lost one, is an "I Can Read" book, which was easily printed in the early 70's, and they are charging me $25 to replace it! I wrote an email to them and I was like, "Ok, I'm sure this book is out of print by now. You want me to replace a book you no longer can even get?" I sent it to the wrong guy. I sent it to some dude named Eric who doesn't even work in circulation who responded, "Yes, if you lose a book, you are expected to pay for it."

WHA? What am I even paying for if it's out of print? Oh, never mind. I'll go in today and take all my cuteness with me and listen, watch the magic. Because I'm not paying for a book that was printed when I was practically a toddler.

Now, about the other two missing books, it's a little trickier because I dropped those at the metro library by mistake, and they are supposedly in "enroute" limbo. There is no connection between my local library and the metro one except some random old white van which occasionally returns wrongly deposited books, but no one knows when. And no one really knows because no one keeps records of these books that end up at the wrong library! I really have no idea if they will be seen again.

And unfortunately, they were both new books. Which I never, ever.. ok.. well, hardly ever, check out new kids books. And I don't think my cuteness will push the right buttons in this case... But see, if I can get out of the $25 'out-of-print-book' fine, I can renew, over and over, the other lost two books to buy me some time.

At ANY rate, it brings me to this: Last week on one of my days off, I was at the library and sitting in my usual comfy chair reading Donald Hall's new book, this one:

Unpacking

Since I can't check-out anything at this time...ahem....I have to read books there.

Don Hall was the U.S. Poet Laureate in..oh, let me see..., I think it was 2006 or something. He's not a favorite poet of mine (which, as you know, the initial pre-requisite entails that to love a particular poet, I need to want to sleep with them) And so it goes, I don't love many women poets (except Mary Oliver and Gertrude Stein) (who, no, I don't want to sleep with, btw) (... or do I...? )(Ok, I'll deal with the (slightly disturbing) closet issue later).

So anyhow. I don't love Donald Hall, but I'm crazy enthralled by his personal story.

I wrote this about him in 2006:

I read such a sad book last night. Last week, I was looking for something at the library by Don Hall who is the Poet Laureate of the U.S. at the moment. I didn't know anything about the guy, even his name, until recently, but I saw his photo.

On CNN one morning while reading the news, I don't know why he was there, but immediately I mentally wrote his name in my noggin, and I looked at his picture for a few minutes. I thought, I really oughta look for one of his books. I love people who look like this, like someone you'd see at a tree nursery or in line at the pharmacy. I also liked that his watch is turned around, the face on the inside of his wrist, which seems practical. I don't wear a watch, but I admire people who do and who have immediate access to the time of day.

So while searching the catalog I found something, and since I fall easily prey to one word titles, I picked the book called Without. I reserved it online, and gathered it up yesterday morning with some other library treasures. The book, it turns out, is a lamentation to his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon.

She's very pretty and 20 years younger than he is. I always notice that with old, straight poets, that a lot of them have a lot younger wives. But this book is about her and about him and what happened while she was sick with leukemia, to which she eventually succumbed.

It seems they spent 20 years or so together after he met her as a student where he'd been teaching at the University of Michigan. They lived their lives at a place called Eagle Pond which had been in his family for generations: "The steadfast presence remains in the possessions, the rooms, and artifacts of the dead. Living in their house we take over their practices and habits which make us feel close to them and to the years that they knew. I always wanted to live in this house with the old people, and now I do, even though they are dead. I don't live in their past, they inhabit my present, where I live as I've never lived before..." -Here at Eagle Pond by Donald Hall , 1990

I read that in the home he and Jane shared, each had their rooms where they would write, he in one, she in the other. They came together at the end of her life though to write her obituary, and she said to him, "Isn't this fun? Isn't writing together fun?" How poignant.

Bill Moyers made a documentary about them in 1993 that he called, "A Life Together." I found it here: http://www.films.com/id/7574/Donald_Hall_and_Jane_Kenyon_A_Life_Together.htm

When I began reading this chronicle of Don Hall's I wasn't eager to pursue it. I really hate books about widows and widowers and the last days with their beloveds, and then, the hereafters. I'm not certain which is sadder: the final moments that they always describe in detail, or the days after, adrift in a haze ... Sometimes there is a heartening though, of how it all means something in the end, the precious time we have with our loved ones... but, then, the idea often diminishes with the thought that we are not doing anything here but losing, suffering, and waiting, ourselves, to be forgotten. It's the strangest and most disturbing catch-22 there is, I suppose ~ trying to reconcile the meaning with the meaningless life.

I read a poem last weekend by Galway Kinnell. He (another old poet with the young wife...) said,

If I die before you which is all but certain
then in the moment before you will see me become someone dead
in a transformation as quick as a shooting star's
I will cross over into you and ask you to carry not only your own memories
but mine too until you too lie down and erase us both together in oblivion...

Ugh.

But, I read it anyway like I end up doing, with a shaky lower lip and tears that flood the words on the page to a blur, which says to me that I am a glutton for a love story, even if it's a sad one. And they are all sad eventually. So afterward, I turned out the light and settled into my pillow, listening to my husband's incessant snore, and this time I didn't push at his shoulder to turn him over. Instead, I put my hand on his chest, felt the vibration though the warm flesh below his clavicle in my fingertips, closed my eyes, and begged it to memory, a love song lulling me to sleep.

Let Evening Come By Jane Kenyon
Let the light of late afternoon shine through chinks in the barn,
moving up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing as a woman takes up her needles and her yarn.
Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned in long grass.
Let the stars appear and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den. Let the wind die down.
Let the shed go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop in the oats, to air in the lung let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don't be afraid.
God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening come.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'll write more later about Don's new book, if I can stay on point, but this dog and me, we need to walk now. And no comment from the peanut gallery Loki, about how long this post is. Read it anyway.


Field is going to be on NPR today. Listen to News and Notes.