And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
Raymond Carver, A New Path to the Waterfall, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989.
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
Raymond Carver, A New Path to the Waterfall, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989.
He said it doesn’t look good
he said it looks bad in fact real bad
he said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before
I quit counting them
I said I’m glad I wouldn’t want to know
about any more being there than that
he said are you a religious man do you kneel down
in forest groves and let yourself ask for help
when you come to a waterfall
mist blowing against your face and arms
do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments
I said not yet but I intend to start today
he said I’m real sorry he said
I wish I had some other kind of news to give you
I said Amen and he said something else
I didn’t catch and not knowing what else to do
and not wanting him to have to repeat it
and me to have to fully digest it
I just looked at him
for a minute and he looked back it was then
I jumped up and shook hands with this man who’d just given me
Something no one else on earth had ever given me
I may have even thanked him habit being so strong
Carver was given his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer in 1987, and wrote this poem based on that fateful consultation with his physician. It begs questions of miscommunication, misunderstanding and discomfort – of what is said and not heard, of what is heard and not understood and, of course, of what goes unsaid.
“What the Doctor Said” by Raymond Carver, from All of Us: Collected Poems.