Lines from a New Hampshire farm

I love to rummage around in a used bookstore. You never know what you’ll find. One year, Lois
and I took a book and plant vacation. We roamed around Vermont and New Hampshire, visiting
used bookstores and gardens that sold plants. We filled up the back of the car with new treasures
for our bookshelves and gardens as we traveled. Years later, we’re still enjoying them. A
substitute would be a library book/plant sale, less travel but the same hunt.

Last fall I was scanning the tables at a local theological library and found
White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946–2006; sixty
years and 414 pages of Donald Hall’s creativity (Houghton Mifflin, 2006).
What was Hall doing amid all those volumes of spiritual advice and
commentaries? Who knows who bequeathed it; but it didn’t make into the
library collection and I took it home. Have been slowly working my way
through the years of poems.

Hall grew up in Hamden, Connecticut, a few years before my family
moved next door to New Haven. His father’s dairy, Brock Hall, delivered
milk to our doorstep. By the time I first discovered his small chapbooks of
poems, he was living with his wife, Jane Kenyon (another poet), in his
grandparents’ farmhouse by a pond in New Hampshire, the same house where he spent summers helping his grandparents. The more I read the poems, the more I travel back to times of helping my Massachusetts grandfather with haying for his one cow, or sugaring on Saturdays with another farmer during my high school years in Vermont.

But, now to sample the poems. One section is headed, “Root Cellar.” Usually a small room

carved out of the sidewall of a dirt-floored cellar where vegetables and apples would keep through the winter. Many of these poems appeared earlier in Kicking the Leaves (1978), so they are like old friends come to visit. For instance, “I remember/coming to the farm in March/in sugaring time, as a small boy./He carried the pails of sap, sixteen-quart/buckets, dangling from each end/of a wooden yoke/that lay across his shoulders, and emptied them/into a vat in the saphouse/where fires burned day and night/for a week.” When I worked with Will on his Vermont hill farm, we didn’t have a yoke, but carried the buckets, one in each hand, from the trees to the gathering tank on the scoot while the horses waited patiently. Then it was off with a whoop, sometimes over a partly snowed-in stone wall, to more trees.

Or, this one from the next section: “On Ragged Mountain birches twist from rifts in granite/Great
ledges show gray though sugarbush. Brown bears/doze all winter under granite outcroppings or in
cellarholes/the first settlers walled with fieldstone./Granite markers recline in high abandoned
graveyards.” The small town in New Hampshire where I went to a one-room school had such a
mountain in view. My father and I would hike it and see all these things Hall saw, especially the
granite outcroppings where there might have been bears in winter—imagine a first grader’s
imagination.

—Larry Sibley