A Sail to Great Island

Contemporary American Poetry

17 Contemporary American Poetry When her eye first gave her trouble, but when I did not yet know this growth would spread through her brain, Mother sent me Donald Hall’s “Kicking the Leaves,” torn from the Times, one of the clippings that piled up around her feet while she read to scout out the news for half-a-dozen people, but particularly for her children, particularly for me. Hall—so uncool—in a poem so humble and conventional, where the leaves are dying leaves, not pie plates, and stand for what we always know they stand for. In a way, this poem was my mother’s leave-taking, what she would have said to me if she wrote poems. My darling, she tried to say, through Hall’s poem, I will soon be leaving you. When you hear about my death you will be staring at a blood red leaf against a raw blue October sky through a film of tears, and you will be an orphan. The price you will have to pay for having been loved—essentially without qualification— by me. I am leaving you now with this clipping, this poem about leaves from the editorial page of the Times, which I read daily, always with thoughts of you. How I resented this poem, which moved me terribly, though it was completely without jokes or irony, unadorned and sad as a New England graveyard, the anthem of our family, not designed for tragedy, other than the loss of each other, my mother signaling to me through the voice of her bearded Protestant avatar: I diminish, not them, as I go first into the leaves 18 taking the step they will follow, Octobers and years from now. Mother, you’d be eighty-four, though younger than some of my students. Like them, you’d listen skeptically to my praise for my contemporaries like Louise Glück. Her mother, Bea, went to high school with me in the Twenties. She’s added the umlaut. Remember her paintings at the library when she just got out of the hospital? See, dear, you were never troubled or gloomy enough to be a poet, though, like Donald Hall, you have and will have losses. Remember his poem about the leaves? I sent you a clipping once, though I know you always threw out my clippings. Still, I sent them, messages for you piling up around my feet each night as I sat and read the Times and thought of you. Now the poem’s in our Contemporary American Poetry anthology, one that puts old enemies, like O’Hara and Lowell, together in an academy of poetry of the world to come. And Hall, who looks healthy now, also had cancer, and nearly died, but here he’s still in his mid-forties, happy his long drought is over and he’s writing again. He’s kicking the leaves, leaping and exultant, recovering from death, and I am rereading his poem, thinking of myself at thirty, scornful and envious, moved and suspicious, reading in his poem, one of the few my mother ever cared to send me, about what he calls the pleasure, the only long pleasure of taking a place in the story of leaves, which is one hundred percent grief. The pleasure, if there is one, is knowing we have the dead inside us, where they have to make peace, and never leave us. My mother, in class today, though dead way back, 19 will go home to hang her coat in the closet of heaven and say: What a wonderful class! I don’t like much in contemporary American poetry, except for “Kicking the Leaves” by Donald Hall. But the teacher— he’s like that Louis Rukeyser on Wall $treet Week I watch faithfully, though I leave the investing to Barney. A man like that—anything he says is worth listening to. ...