ABSTRACT
In a poem that describes the experience of accidently locking oneself out of one's house and trying to get back in again, Raymond Carver reflects ruefully on the impact of minor contingent events on our lives. His description of what happened is so prosaic that Carver recounts it in prose. In Carver's poem, the furniture in the rooms remains in place. Having visualized the furniture, people are primed to imagine why Carver might consider himself to be the luckiest of men, and then why he felt violently ashamed at having found himself locked out of a life of quiet desperation. One of Carver's strengths as a writer is that he is able to light up simple sentences in such a way that they cast a shadow. Carver offers an invitation to read his life and to 'comprehend from it the hieroglyphics of universal life'.
