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If he and she do not know each other, and feel confident
they will not meet again; if he avoids affectionate words;
if she has grown insensible skin under skin; if they desire
only the tribute of another’s cry; if they employ each other
as revenge on old lovers or families of entitlement and steel—
then there will be no betrayals, no letters returned unread,
no frenzy, no hurled words of permanent humiliation,
no trembling days, no vomit at midnight, no repeated
apparition of a body floating face-down at the pond’s edge
From White Apples and the Taste of Stone. Copyright © 2006 by Donald Hall. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
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.