Reading Some Collections of Contemporary Poems


So much coming of age, so many
drunken fathers and grieving mothers,
drunken mothers and grieving fathers.
That’s life, the poets say—booze and grief
with sometime moments of love.
They make it sound sad, but
life has taught me otherwise.
In an empty Albuquerque craft shop
a stranger with time on her hands
laid it out for me
about her three marriages,
how the last one, the one
that only lasted three years,
was enough to make the other two,
and everything else, worthwhile.
If you get three good years
you’re lucky, she said
and the way her face lit
when she said it,
I chose to believe her.
I could tell it was true.