Graduation
When you showed up drunk as hell, humming
tunelessly to yourself, and slumped against
the auditorium’s faux-wood paneling, when
you fumbled in the pockets of your coat,
fished out a cigarette, brought it to your lips,
then, realizing for the first time where you were,
tossed it away and said Fuck it loud enough
that everyone turned in their seats and a friend
elbowed me and asked if I knew you, I shook
my head and spent the next hour wondering why
I was so glad you came. You, who slept
each night in your battered van, who skipped
AA meetings and lied to your sponsor, who still
called your ex-wife every day, restraining order
be damned. You shouldn’t have been there either:
a hundred yards was the agreement
after you gathered all the meds in the house
into a shoebox and threatened to kill yourself.
You had come regardless. You were there.
And I was there. And when I walked the stage
you hollered my name with a kind
of wild conviction, then said it a second time
less convinced, and I thought of that night,
when the cops came and you, unashamed
of the fuss you caused, of your desperate,
public struggle for happiness, kissed me
on the head – once, twice – and went quietly.
tunelessly to yourself, and slumped against
the auditorium’s faux-wood paneling, when
you fumbled in the pockets of your coat,
fished out a cigarette, brought it to your lips,
then, realizing for the first time where you were,
tossed it away and said Fuck it loud enough
that everyone turned in their seats and a friend
elbowed me and asked if I knew you, I shook
my head and spent the next hour wondering why
I was so glad you came. You, who slept
each night in your battered van, who skipped
AA meetings and lied to your sponsor, who still
called your ex-wife every day, restraining order
be damned. You shouldn’t have been there either:
a hundred yards was the agreement
after you gathered all the meds in the house
into a shoebox and threatened to kill yourself.
You had come regardless. You were there.
And I was there. And when I walked the stage
you hollered my name with a kind
of wild conviction, then said it a second time
less convinced, and I thought of that night,
when the cops came and you, unashamed
of the fuss you caused, of your desperate,
public struggle for happiness, kissed me
on the head – once, twice – and went quietly.
“Graduation” was originally published in and has been reprinted here with permission of the author.
Edgar Kunz lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he’s the Third Year Poetry Fellow at Vanderbilt University. He has been awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize and was a finalist for the 2014 Driftless Prize. New work can be found in Redivider, Indiana Review, The Journal, Passages North, AGNI, Devil’s Lake, and Forklift, Ohio.
More About Arcadia
1 Comment
Pingback: