Mistake

A Glittering                                            Sarah Manguso

One mourner says if I can just get through this year as if salvation comes in January.

Slow dance of suicides into the earth:

I see no proof there is anything else. I keep my obituary current, but believe that good times are right around the corner

Una grande scultura posse rotolare giù per una collina senza rompersi, Michelangelo is believed to have said (though he never did): To determine the essential parts of a sculpture, roll it down a hill. The inessential parts will break off.

That hill, graveyard of the inessential, is discovered by the hopeless and mistaken for the world just before they mistake themselves for David's white arms.

They are wrong. But to assume oneself essential is also wrong: a conundrum.

To be neither essential nor inessential—not to exist except as the object of someone's belief, like those good times lying right around the corner—is the only possibility.

Nothing, nobody matters.

And yet the world is full of love . . . 

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". . .even when the universe made it quite clear to me that I was mistaken in my certainties, in my definitions, I did not break. The shattering of my sureties did not shatter me." ~ Lucille Clifton 

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Two Sisters Swim in a Small Locked Box
By Malinda Markham

Sleepers dream of bandaged mouths and bright petals,
a static of bones and inelegant snow.

The night sparrow finally inhaled its own sound. What else
Could have happened? The vessel

was cardboard and twine. They should have strengthened
the moorings, should have cast

their own limbs of matter more promising
than flesh. One sleeper

mistakes a splinter for morning. The other curls
around a small jar of fear.

When the bough revoked its breaking,
the descent became nothing at all.

Two girls stood back to back, entwined.
The initial failure was a rocket-sound of wind. 

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An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.  Niels Bohr 

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Songs of a Girl

by Mary Carolyn Davies

I 

Perhaps, 

God, planting Eden,

Dropped, by mistake, a seed

In Time's neighbor-plot,

That grew to be 

This hour?

II 

You and I picked up Life and looked at it curiously;

We did not know whether to keep it for a plaything or not.

It was beautiful to see, like a red firecracker,

And we knew, too, that it was lighted. 

We dropped it while the fuse was still burning ...

III 

I am going to die too, flower, in a little while--

Do not be so proud.

IV 

The sun is dying

Alone 

On an island

In the bay.

Close your eyes, poppies--

I would not have you see death.

You are so young! 

V 

The sun falls

Like a drop of blood

From some hero.

We,

Who love pain,

Delight in this.