We did right by your death and went out,
Right away, to a public place to drink,
To be with each other, to face it.
We called other friends – the ones
Your mother hadn’t called – and told them
What you had decided, and some said
What you did was right; it was the thing
You wanted and we’d just have to live
With that, that your life had been one
Long misery and they could see why you
Had chosen that, no matter what any of us
Thought about it, and anyway, one said,
Most of us abandoned each other a long
Time ago and we’d have to face that
If we had any hope of getting it right.
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More About
Liam Rector
Liam Rector is the 1998 recipient of the Pen/ New England Award.
His first book of poems was
The Sorrow of Architecture, and he was
editor of
The Day I Was Older: On the Poetry of Donald Hall. He has
received fellowships in poetry from the Guggenheim Foundation and the
National Endowment for the Arts, and he has administered literary
programs at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Academy of American
Poets, Associated Writing Programs, and elsewhere. He has taught at
Goucher College, George Mason University, and Phillips Academy and is
currently the Director of the Writing Seminars at Bennington College.
He took graduate degrees from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and
the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He now resides in
Massachusetts.