Marriage

By Lawrence Raab

 

Years later they find themselves talking   

about chances, moments when their lives   

might have swerved off

for the smallest reason.

                                     What if

I hadn’t phoned, he says, that morning?   

What if you’d been out,

as you were when I tried three times   

the night before?

                           Then she tells him a secret.   

She’d been there all evening, and she knew   

he was the one calling, which was why   

she hadn’t answered.

                               Because she felt—

because she was certain—her life would change   

if she picked up the phone, said hello,   

said, I was just thinking

of you.

            I was afraid,

she tells him. And in the morning   

I also knew it was you, but I just   

answered the phone

                            the way anyone

answers a phone when it starts to ring,   

not thinking you have a choice.

The Major Subjects

By Lawrence Raab

Death is easier
than love. And true feeling, as someone said,
leaves no memory. Or else memory
replaces the past, which we know
never promised to be true.
Consider the sea cucumber:
when attacked it divides, sacrificing half
so that half
won't get eaten. Can the part left undevoured
figure out what to do?
The natural world is always instructive,
mysterious as well, but often
hard to praise. Love
is also difficult—the way it slides into
so many other subjects,
like murder, deceit,
and the moon. As my mother used to say
about anything
we couldn't find: If it had been
a snake it would have bitten you.
Fellow poets, we must
learn again to copy from nature,
see for ourselves
how steadfastly even its beauty
refuses to care or console.

Cold Spring

By Lawrence Raab

The last few gray sheets of snow are gone,
winter’s scraps and leavings lowered
to a common level. A sudden jolt
of weather pushed us outside, and now
this larger world once again belongs to us.
I stand at the edge of it, beside the house,
listening to the stream we haven’t heard
since fall, and I imagine one day thinking
back to this hour and blaming myself
for my worries, my foolishness, today’s choices
having become the accomplished
facts of change, accepted
or forgotten. The woods are a mangle
of lines, yet delicate, yet precise,
when I take the time to look closely.
If I’m not happy it must be my own fault.
At the edge of the lawn my wife
bends down to uncover a flower, then another.
The first splurge of crocuses.
And for a moment the sweep and shudder
of the wind seems indistinguishable
from the steady furl of water
just beyond her.

The Poem That Can't Be Written

By Lawrence Raab

is different from the poem
that is not written, or the many

that are never finished—those boats
lost in the fog, adrift

in the windless latitudes,
the charts useless, the water gone.

In the poem that cannot
be written there is no danger,

no ponderous cargo of meaning,
no meaning at all. And this

is its splendor, this is how
it becomes an emblem,

not of failure or loss,
but of the impossible.

So the wind rises. The tattered sails
billow, and the air grows sweeter.

A green island appears.
Everyone is saved.