The Ship Pounding
Each morning I made my way
among gangways, elevators,
and nurses’ pods to Jane’s room
to interrogate the grave helpers
who tended her through the night
while the ship’s massive engines
kept its propellers turning.
Week after week, I sat by her bed
with black coffee and the Globe.
The passengers on this voyage
wore masks or cannulae
or dangled devices that dripped
chemicals into their wrists.
I believed that the ship
traveled to a harbor
of breakfast, work, and love.
I wrote: "When the infusions
are infused entirely, bone
marrow restored and lymphoblasts
remitted, I will take my wife,
bald as Michael Jordan,
back to our dog and day." Today,
months later at home, these
words turned up on my desk
as I listened in case Jane called
for help, or spoke in delirium,
ready to make the agitated
drive to Emergency again
for readmission to the huge
vessel that heaves water month
after month, without leaving
port, without moving a knot,
without arrival or destination,
its great engines pounding.
Notes
A hospital can feel like a world entirely removed from the one outside. In Donald Hall's The Ship Pounding, the hospital becomes an enormous vessel, filled with patients, nurses, machinery, and the relentless rhythms of medical care. Written during his wife Jane Kenyon's illness, the poem captures the strange experience of living between the ordinary routines of an institution and the terrifying uncertainty of losing someone you love. Illness changes our relationship with time. Days become organized around treatments, test results, and brief moments of reassurance. The body, once so familiar, becomes something monitored and negotiated over, while love confronts the limits of what devotion can actually protect. October's Decay takes on a deeply human dimension here. Hall's hospital continues its mechanical voyage, indifferent to the private suffering unfolding within it. Yet amid that impersonal movement, tenderness persists through the simple act of remaining beside another person. Sometimes endurance means having no power to change what is happening, but refusing to leave someone to face it alone. #DonaldHall #AmericanPoetry #ContemporaryPoetry #IllnessAndGrief #Mortality
Donald Hall, “The Ship Pounding” from Without. Copyright © 1998 by Donald Hall.