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Marriage

By Lawrence Raab b. 1946 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).

Biography

Poet and professor Lawrence Raab was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1946. He earned a BA from Middlebury College and an MA from Syracuse University and has taught at various institutions including American University, the University of Michigan, and Williams College, where is the Morris Professor of Rhetoric. Raab is the author of more than half a dozen collections of poetry, including What We Don’t Know About Each Other . . .

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