"A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety"

"Jane Kenyon was my student. She was smart, she wrote poems, she was funny and frank in class. After the term ended, because I knew she lived in a dormitory near me, one night I asked her to house-sit while I attended an hour-long meeting. (In Ann Arbor, 1970 was the year of breaking and entering.) When I came home, we went to bed. We enjoyed each other, libertine liberty as much as pleasures of the flesh. Later I asked her to dinner, which in that decade always included breakfast. Often we saw each other once a week, still dating others, then twice a week—then three or four times a week, seeing no one else. One night we spoke of marriage. Quickly we changed the subject, because I was nineteen years older, and if we married she would be a widow so long. We married in April 1972. We lived in Ann Arbor three years, then left Michigan for New Hampshire. She adored this old family house. For almost twenty years I woke before Jane and brought her coffee in bed. When she rose, she walked Gus the dog. Then each of us retreated to a workroom to write, at opposite ends of our two-story house. Mine was on the ground floor in front, next to Route 4. Hers was on the second floor in the rear, by Ragged Mountain’s old pasture. In the separation of our double solitude we each wrote poetry in the morning. We met for lunch, eating sandwiches and walking around without chatting. Then we took a twenty-minute nap, gathering energy for the rest of the day, and woke to our daily fuck. Afterward I felt like cuddling, but Jane’s climax released her into energy. She hurried from bed to workroom. For several hours afterward I went back to work at my desk. Late in the afternoon I read aloud to Jane for an hour. I read Wordsworth’s Prelude, Henry James’s The Ambassadors twice, the Old Testament, William Faulkner, seventeenth-century poets, Raymond Carver’s stories, more Henry James. Before supper I drank a beer and glanced at The New Yorker while Jane cooked, sipping a glass of wine. Slowly she made a good dinner—maybe veal cutlets with mushroom and garlic gravy, maybe summer’s asparagus from Jane’s plot across the street—then asked me to carry our plates to the table while she lit the candle. Through dinner we spoke of our separate days. Summer afternoons we spent beside Eagle Pond on a bite-sized beach among frogs, mink, and beaver. Jane lay in the sun tanning while I read magazines in a canvas sling chair. Every now and then we would plunge into the pond. Sometimes for an early supper we broiled sausage on a hibachi. After twenty-three years of an extraordinary marriage, twenty New Hampshire years living and writing together in our double solitude, Jane died of leukemia at forty-seven in 1995. Jane has been dead for more than two decades. Earlier this year I grieved for her in a way I had never grieved before. At eighty-six, I was sick and thought I was dying. Twenty and twenty-one years ago, every day of her dying for eighteen months, I stayed by her side. It was miserable that Jane should die so young, and it was redemptive that I could be with her every hour of every day. Last February I grieved again, this time that she would not sit over me as I died."

"A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety" by Donald Hall: https://a.co/2hVlB1O