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The Man in the Dead Machine
by Donald Hall
High on a slope in New Guinea
the Grumman Hellcat
lodges among bright vines
as thick as arms. In nineteen-forty-three,
the clenched hand of the pilot
glided it here
where no one has ever been.
In the cockpit the helmeted
skeleton sits
upright, held
by dry sinews at neck
and shoulder, the webbing
that straps the pelvic cross
to the cracked
leather of the seat, and the breastbone
to the canvas cover
of the parachute.
Or say that the shrapnel
missed me, I flew
back to the carrier, and every morning
take the train, my pale
hands on the black case, and sit
upright, held
by the firm webbing.
Reprinted with permission of Houghton Mifflin
Donald Hall
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Bio: Donald Hall is one of our foremost men of letters, widely read and loved for his award-winning poetry,
fiction, essays, and children’s literature. He has published sixteen collections of poetry and has edited
numerous anthologies. His poetry has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, The National Book Critics Circle
Award, a Lenore Marshall Award, and the Robert Frost Medal of the Poetry Society of America. He is a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was installed as the nation’s Poet Laureate in October of 2006. Since
1975, when he resigned his university teaching position, Hall has lived in New Hampshire, on Eagle Pond Farm, an old
family house, which he shared with his wife, poet Jane Kenyon. Their life together and her tragic death from leukemia
have been the subjects of many of his poems.
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