In honor of National Poetry Month, I am going to try and share a poem each day. Starting with one of my all-time favorites... What We Don’t Know About Each Other Lawrence Raab In the next room my youngest daughter is practicing the piano. I don’t know why that halting scale has made me think of writing to you, after so many years. Isn’t it always the weather one begins with? Here there is still a little color left, the bronze of the oaks, pale yellows of the lesser trees. Three or four warm days in October are what we believe we’re entitled to, but that turned into a week, then another, until we felt blessed and disconcerted. Today the children and I discovered a small patch of ice and we were excited to have found it, bright and brittle, full of shapes. I walked them out to the bus stop; they ran on ahead, and back to me. It was one of those mornings when you feel the season change, and you think tomorrow you’ll have it again even more keenly. I remembered others. I thought how, looking a long way back, I expect always to uncover some personal design in everything. And so it’s there, by chance, by mistake, by necessity. All the moments that might have gone differently become the scraps of stories I run through while falling asleep, so similar in their melancholy heroism, their few predictable cruelties. For all I know you may have given up thinking about me. For all you know I may have died, a sudden tragic illness, or perhaps the time my car spun out of control on the ice. What they say is true—everything slows down to a long arc, and though you do the right or wrong thing with the wheel, whichever way you’re supposed to turn it, the car goes on as if you’d been abandoned, or released. So there was an odd disappointment plowing into that snowbank, the snap of the seatbelts telling me I was safe, then the stupid difficulties of getting out. Later I could afford to be afraid, when it didn’t matter. Then I just stood there, looking around me at the fields and a small grove of pine trees where snow was sliding off the heavy branches very quietly and very slowly. That whole scene was so sharp and certain, so new, I thought I should feel as if I’d been given a second life. Then would I decide to write to you, hoping to explain how often I’d wished this or that day had gone differently, and you or I had spoken as we never did? Now she’s moved on to a song—”Waltz” or “The Three Boatmen.” You’d laugh to think it was a song at all, but inside those stiff, hesitant repetitions I can hear the melody she’s after. What we know or don’t know about each other— it doesn’t matter, except that I’ve moved beyond these careful inventions. And that young woman you saw this morning hurrying out of the library, fastening her coat, looked like me only for a moment. There was ice on the pathway, the sweet possibility of snow in the air, all of the necessary appearances of change—and yet the life you’ve taken up to make this letter could not be my life, just as this voice was never mine, nor even yours.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 20:21:19 +0000
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