content in the place i've made for myself
practicing stillness near the top of the ridge.
I'm not sure it can be, what the poet
Donald Hall has called a double solitude,*
not for me, but still i think it ideal.
He meant living with Jane, of course,
both of them working alone after breakfast,
artists in love. She died young.
Donald Hall, 86, has stopped writing poems,
not enough testosterone, he says through his beard,
watching in stillness the coming the going.
*—Hall's loving description of his life with fellow poet
and wife Jane Kenyon, 1947-1995.
