what we talk about when we talk about love

In keeping with the original intent of this blog (creating links within the literary world, showing how stories connect writers and collections...Six degrees of separation/Kevin Bacon basically), I thought I'd share how my recent reading of stories in My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead traces back to a Raymond Carver poem I found last week. A day after I found the poem I'm about to tell the story of, I was laying in bed choosing a story to end my night on from My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead. I chose the Raymond Carver short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" because I'd read some of his stories before and find them intriguing.

But mostly I read it because only the day before....

...I was at Carnegie looking for a book of poems for my religion class, and I stumbled upon a collection of Raymond Carver poems. I never knew he wrote poetry, so I picked up the book, entitled All of Us to see what it was all (no pun intended) about. I'd already known that Carver's widow is named Tess Gallagher, so I shouldn't have been so shocked when I opened to a random page and saw the poem "For Tess".

But I was thrilled. And convinced that I'd just experienced some sort of poetry/name serendipity that had a much larger meaning than it did. I rarely see my name in print, and embarrassingly, I got real happy to see an entire poem written to me. It was a nice poem, too.

The last line reminded me a lot of a Nick Laird poem I love:

As I was lying there with my eyes closed,
just after I'd imagined what it might be like
if in fact I never got up again, I thought of you.
I opened my eyes then and got right up
and went back to being happy again.

I'm grateful to you, you see. I wanted to tell you.