Rethinking Regret

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.

--Elaine Sexton

"How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?"

--Don DeLillo, White Noise, p. 198.

Beautiful Dreamer

Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,
Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee;
Sounds of the rude world heard in the day,
Lull'd by the moonlight have all pass'd away!

Beautiful dreamer, queen of my song,
List while I woo thee with soft melody;
Gone are the cares of life's busy throng, --
Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!

Beautiful dreamer, out on the sea
Mermaids are chaunting the wild lorelie;
Over the streamlet vapors are borne,
Waiting to fade at the bright coming morn.

Beautiful dreamer, beam on my heart,
E'en as the morn on the streamlet and sea;
Then will all clouds of sorrow depart, --
Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!

--Stephen Foster

When you are weary with age,
and the hearth is cooling with the dying embers of the evening fire,
remember, my darling: you were loved.
Oh, how you were loved.

When the kettle whistles for an era gone
as you shuffle a waltz to the stove. When
the wind clutches at your bones with an ice impenetrable.
Pause. Consider.

You were loved, through and through. And I was too. I was too.

12th May, 2.30am
Moon-talk. I wake to a ferment of ideas. Is this what Laura means when she talks about the excesses of her premenstrual state? She tells me that women can have heightened states of awareness and wild proliferations of ideas, hormonally, just before menstruation. In my premenstrual migraine I usually feel clumsy and inept and want to shut the world out. But tonight it is full moon, I am bleeding, my belly aches with menstrual cramps and I feel like squatting and baying at the moon. I surrender to the flow of ideas--patterns rather than words. It is a wild connectedness where images merge and fire off each other and my mind explodes. What is this other kind of thinking that happens in the night?

--From Margaret Somerville's Body/Landscape Journals

...Some things

you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I’m saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

--From Philip Levine, 'The Simple Truth'

Shall I compare thee to a winter’s night?
By river’s edge, with inky rolling waves.
Although the ocean’s wind has fearful bite,
In quite no other dark do stars behave.
The autumn flowers wilt at violent rate
And trees in spindly stature bring no shade,
But the most valued of the bulbs do wait,
For winter is when Nature’s start is made.
There is a depth in loss, beauty concealed
That none may understand but those who seek
Such comforts in renewal: a truth revealed
To those in quiet thought who do not speak.
So long as seasons turn to snow and storm,
So long these words aflame may keep you warm.