CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY

Maybe when her eye first gave her trouble, but when I did

not yet know

This was a growth that would spread through her brain,

Mother sent me

Donald Hall's "Kicking the Leaves," which she'd torn from

the Times,

One of the clippings that would pile up by her feet while

she read,

As though she were reading for half-a-dozen of us,

But particularly for her children, particularly for me.

Hall-so uncool-and a poem so humble and conventional,

Where the leaves were dying leaves, not pie plates,

And stood 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,

But unadorned and sad as a New England graveyard,

And was 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

Taking the way they will follow, October 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 Gliick. Her mother, Bea, went to high school with

me

In the Twenties. She's added the umlaut. Remember

Her paintings at the Hewlett Library when she'd just gotten 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 anyway, 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,

The 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, and recovering

from death,

And I am re-reading 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 with us, and never leave us.

My mother, in class today, dead way back,

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 Street Week"

I watch faithfully, though I leave the investing to Barney.

A man like that- anything he says is worth listening to.