The Third Thing by Donald Hall | Poetry Magazine

I told her about an essay by the poet Donald Hall, who, in his eighties and anticipating his own death, felt a resurgence of grief for his late wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, who had died many years earlier. Hall’s grief was compounded by the realization that his wife would not be there to comfort him at the end of his life as he had been able to comf

Perhaps the most difficult marriage of all—the third marriage beneath the two visible, all-too-public marriages of work and relationship—is the internal and often secret marriage to that tricky movable frontier called ourselves: the marriage to the one who keeps changing at the center of all the outer relationships while making promises it hopes to

When their marriage was still new, she never felt the need to lock it, and sometimes he would sit on the bathroom floor as she bathed and the two of them would talk about all the minutes and hours they’d spent apart. But after nearly twenty years together, it is as if their quota of words is almost gone and they have to ration them out, sparingly,

In all marriages there is struggle and ours was no different in that regard. But we always came to the other shore, dusted off, and said, There you are, my love.

one of the abiding themes of this book—that many of the hopes we hold for a particular marriage are never consummated in the way we originally imagined.

To neglect any one of the three marriages is to impoverish them all, because they are not actually separate commitments but different expressions of the way each individual belongs to the world.

But of the future we shared, which actually was just an extension of the present with its daily routines and meals with friends and acquaintances, holiday trips, and visits to parents and in-laws, all enriched by the dream of having children, there was to be nothing.