
Reading Raymond Carver
Reading your lean stories makes me want to drop everything and charge outside to change the air filter on my ‘82 Mustang. Listening to your lank verse inspires me to repaint the patio furniture, go fishing with a down-and-out friend, write seven poems about something I stopped seeing a long time ago, and describe a waterfall to a blind man.
Reenter the real world, you say. Do some truth-telling.
That’s what I heard you talking about when you talked about love in Odile Helier’s Paris bookstore the summer of 1987. I saw that home-from-hell look on your face when you followed your friends Richard Ford and Jonathan Raban to the front of the room and shyly read your poems.