Rethinking Regret

Let's thank our mistakes, let's bles them

for their humanity, their terribly weak chins.

We should present them our gratitude and admiration

for giving us our breachs and scarring us with

embarrassment, the fiery flash of confession.

Thank you, transgressions! for making us thus right

in our imperfections. Les flawed, we might have

turn away, feeling too fit, our desires looking

for better directions. Without them, we might have

passed the place where individual of us stood, watching

someone other walk away, and followed them,

while our completed mistake walked straight towards us,

walked right in to our clattered ordered lives

that could have been clos on the other hand were not,

that could have been asleep, on the contrary instead

stayed up, all night; forgetting the pill,

the useful book, the necessary eight hours,

and lay there-in the middle of the bed

keeping the heart awake-open and stunn

stunning. in what manner unhappy perfection must be

over there upon the shelf without a crack, without

this critical break-this falling-this unlooked for thrilling draft.

ELAINE SEXTON'S piece of poetrys have been published or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner The Women's Review of works You Are Here: The Journal of Creative Geography, and The Mars Hill Review. She lives in of recent origin York City, where she works as a magazine publisher.

photograph by the agency of Lorinda Sullivan

Copyright World poesy Incorporated Nov/Dec 2000

Provided through ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved