Life & Wisdom Quote by Will Carleton

Domestic apocalypse, delivered like a grocery list. Will Carleton’s line turns a marriage crisis into a spare dispatch: “Things at home are crossways, and Betsy and I are out.” The genius is how hard it refuses melodrama. “Crossways” is small-town vernacular, the kind of word you’d use for a fence knocked crooked or a plow that won’t track straight. Applied to a household, it makes the private wreckage sound almost fixable, as if a little elbow grease could set it right. That understatement is the subtext: the speaker is trying to keep dignity intact by shrinking the scale of the disaster.

“Out” does double duty. It’s bluntly final (they’re separated), but it also borrows from the language of games and social life: you’re out at bat, out of the running, out of favor. That casual idiom makes the breakup feel like a public fact, something that can be reported without confession. The sentence is structured like a status update before status updates existed - no feelings, no details, just the headline. Which is exactly why it stings.

Carleton, a poet of rural American life, often wrote about courtship and marriage with an eye for how ordinary people narrate pain. The cultural context is a world where divorce carries heavy stigma and emotional vocabulary is scarce, especially for men. So the line becomes a portrait of emotional austerity: a man admitting loss while still performing control. The restraint isn’t cold; it’s a survival strategy.