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Gratefulness
Let’s thank our mistakes, let’s bless them for their humanity, their terribly weak chins. We should offer them our gratitude and admiration for giving us our clefts and scarring us with embarrassment, the hot flash of confession. Thank you, transgressions! for making us so right in our imperfections. Less flawed, we might have turned away, feeling too fit, our desires looking for better directions. Without them, we might have passed the place where one of us stood, watching someone else walk away, and followed them, while our perfect mistake walked straight towards us, walked right into our cluttered, ordered lives that could have been closed but were not, that could have been asleep, but instead stayed up, all night, forgetting the pill, the good book, the necessary eight hours, and lay there – in the middle of the bed – keeping the heart awake – open and stunned, stunning. How unhappy perfection must be over there on the shelf without a crack, without this critical break – this falling – this sudden, thrilling draft.
Rethinking Regret first appeared in American Poetry Review, Vol. 29, No. 6.
Reprinted with permission from New Issues Press.
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