Classic and Contemporary Poetry
RAY, by HAYDEN CARRUTH Poet Analysis Poet's Biography First Line: How many guys are sitting at their kitchen tables Last Line: Ate that goddamn pie, and it tasted good to me Subject(s): Carver, Raymond (1939-1988) | ||||||||
How many guys are sitting at their kitchen tables right now, one-thirty in the morning, this same time, eating a piece of pie? -- that's what I wondered. A big piece of pie, because I'd just finished reading Ray's last book. Not good pie, not like my mother or my wife could've made, but an ordinary pie I'd just bought, being alone, at the Tops Market two hours ago. And how many had water in their eyes? Because of Ray's book, and especially those last poems written after he knew: the one about the doctor telling him, the one where he and Tess go down to Reno to get married before it happens and shoot some craps on the dark baize tables, the one called "After-Glow" about the little light in the sky after the sun sets. I can just hear him, if he were still here and this were somebody else's book, saying, "Jesus," saying, "This is the saddest son of a bitch of a book I've read in a long time," saying, "A real long time." And the thing is, he knew we'd be saying this about his book, he could just hear us saying it, and in some part of him he was glad! He really was. What crazies we writers are, our heads full of language like buckets of minnows standing in the moonlight on a dock. Ray was a good writer, a wonderful writer, and his poems are good, most of them, and they made me cry, there at my kitchen table with my head down, me, a sixty-seven-year-old galoot, an old fool because all old men are fools, they have to be, shoveling big jagged chunks of that ordinary pie into my mouth, and the water falling from my eyes onto the pie, the plate, my hand, little speckles shining in the light, brightening the colors, and I ate that goddamn pie, and it tasted good to me. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...TIME MAKES US SUPPLICANT WHORES by JAMES HARRISON I'VE NEVER SEEN SUCH A REAL HARD TIME BEFORE' by HAYDEN CARRUTH THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION' by HAYDEN CARRUTH A POST-IMPRESSIONIST SUSURRATION FOR THE FIRST OF NOVEMBER by HAYDEN CARRUTH ABANDONED RANCH, BIG BEND by HAYDEN CARRUTH ADOLF EICHMANN by HAYDEN CARRUTH ALMANACH DU PRINTEMPS VIVAROIS by HAYDEN CARRUTH AN EXPATIATION ON THE COMBINING OF WEATHERS AT THIRTY .... by HAYDEN CARRUTH |
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