The truest thing I can say of Carver’s sober poetry is that I’ve joined it there: A house where no one / was home, no one coming back, / and all I could drink. Those lines resonated so much they felt like a meeting, as if I were sitting on a folding chair in some church basement—listening to Carver’s voice deliver the news that it might be possible, someday, to want more than that.
It takes me so long to process certain things. How similar stories are. Jim taking his family to the airport not going on vacstion with them and going back home to drink in peace for a week.
