In this final selection for "Boundaries" I offer you the gift of a poem by Donald Hall from his collection, Without, which documents his wife Jane Kenyon's bout with leukemia and eventual death in 1995 at the age of forty-eight. Today's quote is the third section of "Song for Lucy." It features an object--a tourmaline ring--that underscores the boundary between life and death, the material embodiment of their desperate hope.
Alone together a moment
on the twenty-second anniversary
of their wedding,
he clasped her as she stood
at the sink, pressing
into her backside, rubbing his cheek
against the stubble
of her skull. He gave her a ring
of pink tourmaline
with nine small diamonds around it.
She put it on her finger
and immediately named it Please Don't Die.
They kissed and Jane
whispered, "Timor mortis conturbat me."
--Donald Hall, Without, (1998)
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