« Art Exhibit | Main | Reading of Names »
The last Week in August's Poems
Happiness
So early it's still almost dark out.
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.
When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.
They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren't saying anything, these boys.
I think if they could, they would take
each other's arm.
It's early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.
They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.
Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.
Raymond Carver
- -
- -
I Stop Writing the Poem
to fold the clothes. No matter who lives
or who dies, I'm still a woman.
I'll always have plenty to do.
I bring the arms of his shirt
together. Nothing can stop
our tenderness. I'll get back
to the poem. I'll get back to being
a woman. But for now
there's a shirt, a giant shirt
in my hands, and somewhere a small girl
standing next to her mother
watching to see how it's done.
Tess Gallagher
- -
- -
Raymond Carver and Tess Gallagher married, after living and working together for ten years, in June, 1988, just months before Raymond Carver died of cancer, that August, at the age of fifty. Theirs was a great love story.
Considered one of the greatest short story writers of all time, some refer to Raymond Carver as the American Chekhov. Anton Chekhov, a Russian doctor and writer, originated the modern short story in the 1880s. Raymond Carver mastered the form and after a hard drinking, hard scrabble existence, won wide recognition late in his writing life. Not widely known as a poet during his lifetime, his poems seem to have a long half-life and are beginning to be considered equal to the great, evocative fiction he wrote.
Tess Gallagher, who studied under renowned poet Theodore Roethke, earned critical acclaim for her poetry before meeting Raymond Carver, and she continues to write poetry and now, fiction. She designed and built a famous house in Washington state, where she lives and works, known as "Sky House".
Posted at August 29, 2005 12:01 AM