I didn’t want to use it at first.
Then I thought, no, it would
give up secrets and bring me luck —
that’s what I needed then.
Besides, he’d left it behind for me
to use when he went swimming that time.
Shortly afterwards, I met two women.
One of them loved opera and the other
was a drunk who’d done time
in jail. I took up with one
and began to drink and fight a lot.
The way this woman could sing and carry on!
We went straight to the bottom.

From All of Us: The Collected Poems by Raymond Carver, copyright © 1996 by Tess Gallagher. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2019 issue of Anglers Journal magazine.

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