In October of the year, he counts potatoes dug from the brown field, counting the seed, counting the cellar’s portion out, and bags the rest on the cart’s floor. He packs wool sheared in April, honey in combs, linen, leather tanned from deerhide, and vinegar in a barrel hooped by hand at the forge’s fire. He walks by his ox’s head, ten days to Portsmouth Market, and sells potatoes, and the bag that carried potatoes, flaxseed, birch brooms, maple sugar, goose feathers, yarn. When the cart is empty he sells the cart. When the cart is sold he sells the ox, harness and yoke, and walks home, his pockets heavy with the year’s coin for salt and taxes, and at home by fire’s light in November cold stitches new harness for next year’s ox in the barn, and carves the yoke, and saws planks building the cart again.
—Donald Hall
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“Ox Cart Man” from THE SELECTED POEMS OF DONALD HALL by Donald Hall.
Copyright © 2015 by Donald Hall.
Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.
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Donald Hall
Donald Hall (1928-2018) published 22 poetry collections, including Exiles and Marriages (1955), The Happy Man (1986), and The One Day (1988), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Hall served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2006 to 2007.