April 27: Hard and Sweet, Donald Hall, "Maple Syrup"

I will return to Tyehimba Jess tomorrow night.

Tonight, in honor of the meeting of my Book Club, I have a poem by Donald Hall to share with you.  It's beautiful and hard and sweet.

And it makes Saint Marty hungry for pancakes.

Maple Syrup

by:  Donald Hall

August, goldenrod blowing. We walk

into the graveyard, to find

my grandfather’s grave. Ten years ago

I came here last, bringing

marigolds from the round garden

outside the kitchen.

I didn’t know you then.

                                  We walk

among carved names that go with photographs

on top of the piano at the farm:

Keneston, Wells, Fowler, Batchelder, Buck.

We pause at the new grave

of Grace Fenton, my grandfather’s

sister. Last summer

we called on her at the nursing home,

eighty-seven, and nodding

in a blue housedress. We cannot find

my grandfather’s grave.

                                  Back at the house

where no one lives, we potter

and explore the back chamber

where everything comes to rest: spinning wheels,

pretty boxes, quilts,

bottles, books, albums of postcards.

Then with a flashlight we descend

firm steps to the root cellar—black,

cobwebby, huge,

with dirt floors and fieldstone walls,

and above the walls, holding the hewn

sills of the house, enormous

granite foundation stones.

Past the empty bins

for squash, apples, carrots, and potatoes,

we discover the shelves for canning, a few

pale pints

of tomato left, and—what

is this?—syrup, maple syrup

in a quart jar, syrup

my grandfather made twenty-five

years ago

for the last time.

                           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 fire burned day and night

for a week.

                Now the saphouse

tilts, nearly to the ground,

like someone exhausted

to the point of death, and next winter

when snow piles three feet thick

on the roofs of the cold farm,

the saphouse will shudder and slide

with the snow to the ground.

                                          Today

we take my grandfather’s last

quart of syrup

upstairs, holding it gingerly,

and we wash off twenty-five years

of dirt, and we pull

and pry the lid up, cutting the stiff,

dried rubber gasket, and dip our fingers

in, you and I both, and taste

the sweetness, you for the first time,

the sweetness preserved, of a dead man

in the kitchen he left

when his body slid

like anyone’s into the ground.