The Painted Bed
"Even when I danced erect by the Nile’s garden I constructed Necropolis. Ten million fellaheen cells of my body floated stones to establish a white museum." Grisly, foul, and terrific is the speech of bones, thighs and arms slackened into desiccated sacs of flesh hanging from an armature where muscle was, and fat. "I lie on the painted bed diminishing, concentrated on the journey I undertake to repose without pain in the palace of darkness, my body beside your body."
Credit
From White Apples and the Taste of Stone. Copyright © 2006 by Donald Hall. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
Author
Donald Hall
Donald Hall was born on September 20, 1928, and grew up in Hamden, Connecticut. He began writing as an adolescent and attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at the age of sixteen—the same year he had his first work published. Hall earned a BA from Harvard University in 1951 and a bachelor of letters degree from the University of Oxford in 1953. The next year he received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, followed by a fellowship from Harvard University.
Date Published
01/01/2006