Painted Bed（ISBN=） 英文原版

　　Affirmation To grow old is to lose everything. Aging,
everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it
sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row
for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content. But a
marriage, that began without harm, scatters into debris on the
shore, and a friend from school drops cold on a rocky strand. If a
new love carries us past middle age, our wife will die at her
strongest and most beautiful. New women come and go. All go. The
pretty lover who announces that she is temporary is temporary. The
bold woman, middle-aged against our old age, sinks under an anxiety
she cannot withstand. Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years. Let us stifle under mud at the
pond’s edge and affirm that it is fitting and delicious to lose
everything.

　　Donald Hall has received the National Book Critics Circle
Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry for The One
Day (1989), the Lenore Marshall Award for The Happy Man (1987), the
1990 Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America for Old and New
Poems (1990), and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. He is a member of
the American Academy of Arts and Letters and lives in New
Hampshire.