This morning there’s snow everywhere. We remark on it.You tell me you didn’t sleep well. I sayI didn’t either. You had a terrible night. “Me too.”We’re extraordinarily calm and tender with each otheras if sensing the other’s rickety state of mind.As if we knew what the other was feeling. We don’t,of course. We never do.… Continue reading Raymond Carver
But this word love—this word grows dark, growsheavy and shakes itself, beginsto eat, to shudder and convulseit way through this paperuntil we too have dimmed inits transparent throat and stillare riven, are glistening, hip and thigh, yourloosened hair which knowsno hesitation. — Raymond Carver, last strophe to “This Word Love,” A New Path to the… Continue reading Raymond Carver
Every day, every night of our lives, we’re leaving little bits of ourselves, flakes of this and that, behind. Where do they go, these bits and pieces of ourselves? – Raymond Carver, from “Collectors,” Will You Please be Quiet, Please? Stories (Vintage, 1992)
The Road What a rough night! It’s either no dreams at all,or else a dream that may or may not bea dream portending loss. Last night I was dropped offwithout a word on a country road.A house back in the hills showed a lightno bigger than a star.But I was afraid to go there, and… Continue reading Raymond Carver
Do me a favor this morning. Draw the curtain and come back to bed.Forget the coffee. We’ll pretendwe’re in a foreign country, and in love. — Raymond Carver, from “The Road,” Where Water Comes Together With Other Water. (Vintage; 1 edition March 12, 1986) Originally published 1984.
I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can’t believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could… Continue reading Raymond Carver
Just when he had given up thinking / he’d ever write another line of poetry, / she began brushing her hair. — Raymond Carver, from “The March into Russia,” A New Path to the Waterfall: Poems (The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989)
I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark. ― Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. (Knopf 1981)
I talk to myself like this.Saying the names of things —capstan, hawser, loam, leaf, furnace.Your face, your mouth, your shoulderinconceivable to me now!Where did they go? It’s likeI dreamed them. The stones we broughthome from the beach lie face upon the windowsill, cooling.Come home. Do you hear?My lungs are thick with the smokeof your absence.… Continue reading Raymond Carver
A crow flew into the tree outside my window. It was not Ted Hughes’s crow, or Galway’s crow. Or Frost’s, Pasternak’s, or Lorca’s crow. Or one of Homer’s crows, stuffed with gore, after the battle. This was just a crow. That never fit in anywhere in its life, or did anything worth mentioning. It sat… Continue reading Raymond Carver
The Vale of Soul-Making 