dual personalities

Names of Horses

All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding

and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul

sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,

for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.

 

In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,

dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.

All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine

clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;

 

and after noon’s heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres,

gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,

and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn,

three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning.

 

Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load

a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns.

Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill

of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.

 

When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,

one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning,

led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,

and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,

 

and lay the shotgun’s muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,

and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave,

shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,

where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.

 

For a hundred and fifty years, in the Pasture of dead horses,

roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,

yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter

frost heaved your bones in the ground – old toilers, soil makers:

 

O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.

–Donald Hall from Kicking the Leaves (1978)

Today we toast the poet Donald Hall (September 20, 1928 – June 23, 2018) whose birthday it is. I missed the fact that he died earlier this year.

Hall published more than fifty books, from poetry and drama to biography and memoirs, and edited numerous anthologies, including  New Poets of England and America (1957; coedited with Robert Pack and Louis Simpson). He went to Exeter, Harvard and Oxford, had a successful career as an academic and editor, then happily went to live on his ancestral farm in New Hampshire and devoted himself to poetry. 

I remember this book from my children’s childhood.

In other news, the wee babes dropped by my office yesterday and ran up and down the long hallways.

They are both recovering from ear infections, so they didn’t stay long, but it was sure fun to see them and their daddy who brought them.

It is still pretty hot here in flyover country. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for fall. Enough already.

*Plato