November 7: Some Inspiration, Galway Kinnell, "How Could You Not"

It's a cold, snowy night.  My kids are spending the night at grandma's house.  The late news is on, and I'm tired.  Ready for bed.

I'm still feeling a little melancholy.  Not as bad as a few days ago.  Weekends always lift my spirits.  I have a lot to accomplish over the next couple of days.  I have to get my daughter her pointe shoes for ballet.  I have to put up my Christmas tree.  And I have to work on my annual Christmas essay.

So, I need some inspiration.  I'm going to read some good poets.  Watch a couple Christmas movies, probably It's A Wonderful Life and A Charlie Brown Christmas.  Maybe I'll even throw a little Kenny G on the CD player.

Saint Marty will start with the Galway Kinnell poem below.  It's a beautiful elegy for the great poet Jane Kenyon, late wife of Donald Hall.

How Could You Not

by:  Galway Kinnell

-- for Jane Kenyon

It is a day after many days of storms.
Having been washed and washed, the air glitters;
small heaped cumuli blow across the sky; a shower
visible against the firs douses the crocuses.
We knew it would happen one day this week.
Now, when I learn you have died, I go
to the open door and look across at New Hampshire
and see that there, too, the sun is bright
and clouds are making their shadowy ways along the horizon;
and I think: How could it not have been today?
In another room, Keri Te Kanawa is singing
the Laudate Dominum of Mozart, very faintly,
as if in the past, to those who once sat
in the steel seat of the old mowing machine,
cheerful descendent of the scythe of the grim reaper,
and drew the cutter bars little
reciprocating triangles through the grass
to make the stalks lie down in sunshine.
Could you have walked in the dark early this morning
and found yourself grown completely tired
of the successes and failures of medicine,
of your year of pain and despair remitted briefly
now and then by hope that had that leaden taste?
Did you glimpse in first light the world as you loved it
and see that, now, it was not wrong to die
and that, on dying, you would leave
your beloved in a day like paradise?
Near sunrise did you loosen your hold a little?
How could you not already have felt blessed for good,
having these last days spoken your whole heart to him,
who spoke his whole heart to you, so that in the silence
he would not feel a single word was missing?
How could you not have slipped into a spell,
in full daylight, as he lay next to you,
with his arms around you, as they have been,
it must have seemed, all your life?
How could your cheek not press a moment to his cheek,
which presses itself to yours from now on?
How could you not rise and go, with all that light
at the window, those arms around you, and the sound,
coming or going, hard to say, of a single-engine
plane in the distance that no one else hears?