Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Poetry News:

— When Donald Hall’s father died, he said he wrote immediately about his father’s passing, but that the poem took 17 years to complete —

— delicate and imaginative tableaus —

— who said it better, t…

If it’s possible, Hall’s an even worse prose writer than poet. Without is an atrocious book- not an ounce of insight, and just one long whine.

Yes, it’s sad his wife died relatively young, but the man made a fortune off her death.

Here’s a better poem on the same theme:

My Papa’s Waltz
Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.