The Painted Bed: Poems

By Donald Hall

The former US poet laureate delivers a book “filled with raw sexual disclosures, rowdy anger and a self-blasting mockery” (The New York Times).

Donald Hall’s fourteenth collection opens with an epigraph from the Urdu poet Faiz: “The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved.” In that poetic tradition, as in The Painted Bed, the beloved might be a person or something else—life itself, or the disappearing countryside. Hall’s new poems further the themes of love, death, and mourning so powerfully introduced in his Without (1998), but from the distance of passed time. A long poem, “Daylilies on the Hill 1975-1989,” moves back to the happy repossession of the poet’s old family house and its history—a structure that “persisted against assaults” as its generations of residents could not. These poems are by turns furious and resigned, spirited and despairing—”mania is melancholy reversed,” as Hall writes in another long poem, “Kill the Day.” In this book’s fourth and final section, “Ardor,” the poet moves toward acceptance of new life in old age; eros reemerges.

“More controlled, more varied and more powerful, this taut follow-up volume [to Without] reexamines Hall’s grief while exploring the life he has made since. The book’s first poem, ‘Kill the Day,’ stands among the best Hall has ever written.” —Publishers Weekly

“A compelling, sometimes shocking, and certainly deeply moving depiction of bereavement.” —Poetry

“Hall has continued growing as a poet, and his steady readers may consider this his finest collection . . . Bleakness and beauty characterize the reminiscent lyrics that follow, too, joined by a breathtaking bluntness.” —Booklist

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 7, 2003
• ISBN: 9780547347059

Donald Hall

DONALD HALL (1928-2018) served as poet laureate of the United States from 2006 to 2007. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, awarded by the president.

Book preview

title page

Contents

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Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Epigraph

Dedication

THE PAINTED BED

I. Kill the Day

II. Deathwork

1. The After Life

2. The Purpose of a Chair

3. Her Garden

III. Daylilies

IV. Ardor

Acknowledgments

About the Author

First Mariner Books edition 2003

Copyright © 2002 by Donald Hall

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

ISBN 978-0-618-18789-8 hardcover

ISBN 978-0-618-34075-0 paperback

eISBN 978-0-547-34705-9

v2.0421

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

and acknowledgments appear on page 89.

The true subject of poetry

is the death of the beloved.

—Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Joyce

Caroline

Alice

THE PAINTED BED

"Even when I danced erect

by the Nile’s garden

I constructed Necropolis.

Ten million fellaheen cells

of my body floated stones

to establish a white museum."

Grisly, foul, and terrific

is the speech of bones,

thighs and arms slackened

into desiccated sacs of flesh

hanging from an armature

where muscle was, and fat.

"I lie on the painted bed

diminishing, concentrated

on the journey I undertake

to repose without pain

in the palace of darkness,

my body beside your body."

I. Kill the Day

…

Work, love, build a house, and die.

—The One Day

Kill the Day

When she died it was as if his car accelerated

off the pier’s end and zoomed upward over death water

for a year without gaining or losing altitude,

then plunged to the bottom of the sea where his corpse

lay twisted in a honeycomb of steel, still dreaming

awake, as dead as she was but conscious still.

There is nothing so selfish as misery nor so boring,

and depression is devoted only to its own practice.

Mourning resembles melancholia precisely except

that melancholy adds self-loathing to stuporous sorrow

and turns away from the dead its exclusive attention.

Mania is melancholy reversed. Bereavement, loss,

and guilt provide excitement for conversion

to dysphoria, murderous rage, and unsleeping joy.

When he rose from the painted bed, he alternated or cycled

from dedicated hatred through gaiety and inflation

to the vacancy of breathing in-and-out, in-and-out.

He awakened daily to the prospect of nothingness

in the day’s house that like all houses was mortuary.

He slept on the fornicating bed of the last breath.

He closed her eyes in the noon of her middle life;

he no longer cut and pruned for her admiration;

he worked for the praise of women and they died.

For months after her chest went still, he nightmared

that she had left him for another man. Everything

became its opposite and returned to itself.

As the second summer of her death approached him,

goldfinches flew at her feeder like daffodils

with wings and