from "Last Days," by Donald Hall

p.139

“Dying is simple,” she said.
“What’s worst is . . . the separation.”
When she no longer spoke,
they lay alone together, touching,
and she fixed on him
her beautiful enormous round brown eyes,
shining, unblinking,
and passionate with love and dread.


Those eyes stay with me after I’ve put the book down. Everything of their love seems to be in that gaze. I admire how spare and sure Hall’s writing is, nothing extraneous.