All of Us by Raymond Carver Read Free Book Online Page A

eat breaded oysters and fries
    with lemon cookies for dessert, as the marriage
    of Kitty and Levin unfolds on Public TV.
    The man in the trailer up the hill, our neighbor,
    has just gotten out of jail again.
    This morning he drove into the yard with his wife
    in a big yellow car, radio blaring.
    His wife turned off the radio while he parked,
    and together they walked slowly
    to their trailer without saying anything.
    It was early morning, birds were out.
    Later, he propped open the door
    with a chair to let in spring air and light.
    It’s Easter Sunday night,
    and Kitty and Levin are married at last.
    It’s enough to bring tears to the eyes, that marriage
    and all the lives it touched. We go on
    eating oysters, watching television,
    remarking on the fine clothes and amazing grace
    of the people caught up in this story, some of them
    straining under the pressures of adultery,
    separation from loved ones, and the destruction
    they must know lies in store just after
    the next cruel turn of circumstance, and then the next.
    A dog barks. I get up to check the door.
    Behind the curtains are trailers and a muddy
    parking area with cars. The moon sails west
    as I watch, armed to the teeth, hunting
    for my children. My neighbor,
    liquored up now, starts his big car, races
    the engine, and heads out again, filled
    with confidence. The radio wails,
    beats something out. When he has gone
    there are only the little ponds of silver water
    that shiver and can’t understand their being here.
The Other Life
    Now for the other life. The one
    without mistakes.
    — LOU LIPSITZ
    My wife is in the other half of this mobile home
    making a case against me.
    I can hear her pen
scratch, scratch.
    Now and then she stops to weep,
    then—
scratch, scratch.
    The frost is going out of the ground.
    The man who owns this unit tells me,
    Don’t leave your car here.
    My wife goes on writing and weeping,
    weeping and writing in our new kitchen.
The Mailman as Cancer Patient
    Hanging around the house each day
    the mailman never smiles; he tires
    easily, is losing weight,
    that’s all; they’ll hold the job —
    besides, he needed a rest.
    He will not hear it discussed.
    As he walks the empty rooms, he
    thinks of crazy things
    like Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey,
    shaking hands with Franklin D. Roosevelt
    at Grand Coulee Dam,
    New Year’s Eve parties he liked best;
    enough things to fill a book
    he tells his wife, who
    also thinks crazy things
    yet keeps on working.
    But sometimes at night
    the mailman dreams he rises from his bed
    puts on his clothes and goes
    out, trembling with joy…
    He hates those dreams
    for when he wakes
    there’s nothing left; it is
    as if he’d never been
    anywhere, never done anything;
    there is just the room,
    the early morning without sun,
    the sound of a doorknob
    turning slowly.
Poem for Hemingway
& W. C. Williams
    3 fat trout hang
        in the still pool
    below the new
        steel bridge.
    two friends
        come slowly up
    the track.
        one of them,
    ex-heavyweight,
        wears an old
    hunting cap.
        he wants to kill,
    that is catch & eat,
        the fish.
    the other,
        medical man,
    he knows the chances
        of that.
    he thinks it fine
        that they should
    simply hang there
        always
    in the clear water.
        the two keep going
    but they
        discuss it as
    they disappear
        into the fading trees
    & fields & light,
        upstream.
Torture
    FOR STEPHEN DOBYNS
    You are falling in love again. This time
    it is a South American general’s daughter.
    You want to be stretched on the rack again.
    You want to hear awful things said to you
    and to admit these things are true.
    You want to have unspeakable acts
    committed against your person, things
    nice people don’t talk about in classrooms.
    You want to tell everything you know
    on Simon Bolivar, on Jorge Luis Borges,
    on yourself most of all.
    You want to implicate everyone in this!
    Even when it’s four o’clock