Winter Insomnia
Raymond Carver


The mind can't sleep, can only lie awake and
gorge, listening to the snow gather as
for some final assault.

It wishes Chekov were here to minister
something—three drops of valerian, a glass
of rose water—anything, it wouldn't matter.

The mind would like to get out of here
onto the snow. It would like to run
with a pack of shaggy animals, all teeth,

under the moon, across the snow, leaving
no prints or spoor, nothing behind.
The mind is sick tonight.

Photograph of My Father in his Twenty-Second Year
Raymond Carver


October. Here in this dank, unfamiliar kitchen
I study my father's embarrassed young man's face.
Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string
of spiny yellow perch, in the other
a bottle of Carlsbad beer.

In jeans and denim shirt, he leans
against the front fender of a 1934 Ford.
He would like to pose bluff and hearty for his posterity,
wear his old hat cocked over his ear.
All his life my father wanted to be bold.

But the eyes give him away, and the hands
that limply offer the string of dead perch
and the bottle of beer. Father, I love you,
yet how can I say thank you, I who can't hold my liquor either,
and don't even know the places to fish?

poem for karl wallenda, aerialist supreme
Raymond Carver


When you were little, wind tailed you
all over Magdeburg. In Vienna wind looked 
for you in first one courtyard then another.
It overturned fountains, it made your hair stand on end.
In Prague wind accompanied serious young couples
just starting families. But you made their breaths catch,
those ladies in long white dresses,
those men with their moustaches and high collars.
It waited in the cuffs of your sleeves
when you bowed to the Emperor Haile Selassie.
It was there when you shook hands
with the democratic King of the Belgians.
Wind rolled mangoes and garbage sacks down the streets of Nairobi.
You saw wind pursuing zebras across the Serengeti Plain.
Wind joined you as you stepped off the eaves of suburban houses
in Sarasota, Florida. It made little noises
in trees at every crossroads town, every circus stop.
You remarked on it all your life,
how it could come from nowhere,
how it stirred the puffy faces of the hydrangeas
below hotel room balconies while you
drew on your big Havana and watched
the smoke stream south, always south,
toward Puerto Rico and the Torrid Zone.
That morning, 74 years old and 10 stories up,
midway between hotel and hotel, a promotional stunt
on the first day of spring, that wind which has been
everywhere and done everything with you,
it comes in from the Caribbean
to throw itself once and for all into your arms, like a young lover!
Your hair crawls. You try to crouch, to reach for wire.
Later, men come along to clean up
and take down the wire. They take down the wire
where you spent your life. Imagine that: wire.