TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

History is filled with befores and afters. There’s B.C and A.D., which refer to the years before and after the traditionally estimated birth of Christ. There’s prewar and postwar (meaning World War II), pre-9/11 and post-9/11, pre-pandemic and…whatever time we’re in now. I’ve heard people call the years before COVID “the beforetimes,” but certainly there have been other “beforetimes.” 

I think we all have experiences in our personal lives that mark the end of one era and the beginning of another. Moving out of your childhood home and beginning your adult life away from your parents. Graduating from high school or college. Moving from one place to another, or getting married, or having children.

I can remember a few “beforetimes” in my own life, though some are foggier than others. It’s hard for me to clearly imagine the life I had before my kids. It’s also hard for me to conjure the life I had with my ex-husband, and the life I had before him. Now is so… well, present. I’m happy, and I feel like my life is as it should be. I don’t want to go back. But the past is never really past; it’s with us, because it changes us. The past shaped who we are in the present. 

Today’s poem is a love poem, one in which the long-married speaker can hardly imagine their own “beforetimes”—the life before their spouse.

Now that we’ve been married all these years,
by Keetje Kuipers

tiny prop planes drag banners against
the sky selling us things we already have.

And whatever else crosses the landscape—
smoking engine of the trawler, polka-dotted

lantern fly, tendril of melted ice cream
snail-stickying your wrist’s golden

expanse—is just one more thing I don’t have
a choice about loving. I know there was a time

before I met you, but that fact is like knowing
that the length of my veins could wrap around

the Earth four times or that each year on Saturn 
it rains ten million tons of diamonds—imaginable,

but just barely. Because love before your arrival 
had been an idiopathic thing, pain without

a diagnosable source, a sensation that divided me
from the people I loved because I was the only one

who could feel it. When some people get married, 
they’re making a pact with another person.

When I married you, I made a pact with the world.
I live in it now, and refuse myself nothing.

“Now That We’ve Been Married All These Years" by Keetje Kuipers from LONELY WOMEN MAKE GOOD LOVERS © 2025 Keetje Kuipers. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions.