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I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.

Donald Hall

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Donald Hall
Age: 89 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 20
Died: 2018
Died: June 23
Author
Critic
Poet
Writer
New Haven
Connecticut
Gray
Rising
Grief
Loss
Behinds
Clump
Behind
Birch
Wish
Alongside
Oaks

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Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.
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If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.
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Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you by that time, you ought to have them right.
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I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.
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In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty's torch. In football you run over somebody's face.
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Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.
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For most baseball fans, maybe oldest is always best. We love baseball because it seizes and retains the past, like the snowy village inside a glass paperweight.
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Great literature, if we read it well, opens us up to the world and makes us more sensitive to it, as if we acquired eyes that could see through things and ears that could hear smaller sounds.
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Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.
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Mere literary talent is common what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.
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Joe DiMaggio batting sometimes gave the impression, the suggestion that the old rules and dimensions of baseball no longer applied to him, and that the game had at last grown unfairly easy.
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Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.
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To grow old is to lose everything.
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We learned how to love each other by loving together good things wholly outside each other.
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The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.
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Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.
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Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.
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The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
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For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of dead horses, roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs, yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter frost heaved your bones in the ground--old toilers, soil makers: O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.
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Can build plane... Delivery about three months.
Donald Hall