Our Souls at Night

by Kent Haruf

But we didn’t know anything in our twenties when we were first married. It was all just instinct and the patterns we’d grown up with.

I wanted to be a poet. I don’t think anyone but Diane ever knew that. I was studying literature in college and getting a teaching certificate at the same time. But I was crazy about poetry. All the standard poets that we read then. T. S. Eliot. Dylan Thomas. e.e. cummings. Robert Frost. Walt Whitman. Emily Dickinson. Individual poems by Housman and Matthew Arnold and John Donne. Shakespeare’s sonnets. Browning. Tennyson. I memorized some of them.

She had stopped going to any church because of her feelings about orthodoxy and the childish ways in which churches talked and thought about God.