Heck Of A Guy

Sometimes, it seems that predestination and fate are hard core realities rather than abstract concepts, and the notion of choice becomes as impotent and meaningless as an obscure and once disputed grammatical rule of a long dead language.

Sometimes, I have no choice about the content and direction of my thoughts.

Today is one of those times.

Donald Hall was named this country’s Poet Laureate last week, and since that time, his verses, which both evoke the loss I felt with Julie’s¹ death and help me deal with it, have been much on my mind.

Today, alone in my house for a few hours, I have finally surrendered my resistance, abandoning my efforts to pummel an ostensibly clever blog post into presentable shape for publishing in favor of wrapping myself in Hall’s poetry as well as the other paraphernalia that link me to Julie.

So, instead of whatever wit I might have gathered for your entertainment, today I must offer you this brief poem from Donald Hall.

DISTRESSED HAIKU
by Donald Hall

In a week or ten days
the snow and ice
will melt from Cemetery Road.

I’m coming! Don’t move!

*
Once again it is April.
Today is the day
we would have been married
twenty-six years.

I finished with April
halfway through March.

*
You think that their
dying is the worst
thing that could happen.

Then they stay dead.

*
Will Hall ever write
lines that do anything
but whine and complain?

In April the blue
mountain revises
from white to green.

*
The Boston Red Sox win
a hundred straight games.
The mouse rips
the throat of the lion

and the dead return.

Footnotes

1. Julie Showalter was the fiercely intelligent, sexy, and loving woman and prize-winning author, with whom I had a outrageously wonderful 20 year marriage that ended with her death in late 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding nearly 20 years earlier. Many posts on this blog are about her, our unlikely romance, and our life together, and still others consist of her writings. Information can be found at Julie Showalter FAQ. ↩

Show Social Bookmarks

Hide Sites