Two Poems by Lawrence Raab

Cold Spring

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.

Marriage

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 has published nine books of poetry: Mysteries of the Horizon, Doubleday, 1972; The Collector of Cold Weather, Ecco Press, 1976; Other Children, Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1986; What We Don’t Know about Each Other, Penguin Books, 1993; (With Stephen Dunn) Winter at the Caspian Sea, Palanquin Press, 1999; The Probable World, Penguin Books, 2000; Visible Signs: New and Selected Poems, Penguin Poets, 2003; The History of Forgetting, Penguin Books, 2009; Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts, Tupelo Press, 2015.

His poems have been published in such periodicals as Poetry, Paris Review, Kayak, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, American Scholar and others.