On timing, choices, futility

emilylouisesmith: One of my favorite poems

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.

Lawrence Raab, “Marriage” from What We Don’t Know About Each Other. Copyright © 1993 by Lawrence Raab. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Source: Poetry (November 1990).

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   my favorite poems

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