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Click the "Play" button on the control panel above Letter in Autumn by Donald Hall This first October of your death I sit in my blue chair looking out at late afternoon's western light suffusing its goldenrod yellow over the barn's unpainted boards— here where I sat each fall watching you pull your summer's garden up. Yesterday I cleaned out your Saab to sell it. The dozen tapes I mailed to Caroline. I collected hairpins and hair ties. In the Hill's Balsam tin Where you kept silver for tolls I found your collection of slips from fortune cookies: YOU ARE A FANTASTIC PERSON! YOU ARE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WHO GOES PLACES IN THEIR LIFE! As I slept last night: You leap from our compartment in an underground railroad yard and I follow; behind us the train clatters and sways; I turn and turn again to see you tugging at a gold bugle welded to a freight car; then you vanish into the pitchy clanking dark. Here I sit in my blue chair not exactly watching Seattle beat Denver in the Kingdome. Last autumn above Pill Hill we looked from the eleventh floor down at Puget Sound, at Seattle's skyline, and at the Kingdome scaffolded for repair. From your armature of tubes, you asked, "Perkins, am I going to live?" When you died in April, baseball took up its cadences again under the indoor ballpark's patched and recovered ceiling. You would have admired the Mariners, still hanging on in October, like blue asters surviving frost. Sometimes when I start to cry, I wave it off: "I just did that." When Andrew wearing a dark suit and necktie telephones from his desk, he cannot keep from crying. When Philippa weeps, Allison at seven announces, "The river is flowing." Gus no longer searches for you, but when Alice or Joyce comes calling he dances and sings. He brings us one of your white slippers from the bedroom. I cannot discard your jeans or lotions or T-shirts. I cannot disturb your tumbles of scarves and floppy hats. Lost unfinished things remain on your desk, in your purse or Shaker basket. Under a cushion I discover your silver thimble. Today when the telephone rang I thought it was you. At night when I go to bed Gus drowses on the floor beside me. I sleep where we lived and died in the painted Victorian bed under the tiny lights you strung on the headboard when you brought me home from the hospital four years ago. The lights still burned last April early on a Saturday morning while you died. At your grave I find tribute: chrysanthemums, cosmos, a pumpkin, and a poem by a woman who "never knew you" who asks, "Can you hear me Jane?" there is an apple and a heart— shaped pebble. Looking south from your stone, I gaze at the file of eight enormous sugar maples that rage and flare in dark noon, the air grainy with mist like the rain of Seattle's winter. The trees go on burning Without ravage of loss or disorder. I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside. Poem: "Letter in Autumn" by Donald Hall,
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