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I Read Your Poem About Falling In Love

with the swimming Parisian girl
then realized you meant me

and that her long wet arms
cutting the glass river

waves of the Seine were my
glistening arms and her powerful

shoulders emerging at the stone steps
were my sea-goddess shoulders

and you were clever to mention
her raven hair and olive skin

which concealed beautifully
how you once traced a crescent moon

at the pale bloodless hollow
of my throat with a rose. And

in the St. Eve hotel where you
and she whispered and teased

and watched the white party boats drift
like unopened love notes

under the stone bridges blurred
by spitting snow, it was tears

wasn't it? You meant tears
didn't you? And you knew

I'd recognize the lost
brown dog at the end

half drowned and dragging
his tattered red leash

over the moss-slick cobblestones—
knew that it would touch me

like seaweed and silt; like missing
sailors shouting from a distance halved

by twisted sextants, silver grief.

Elizabeth Edwards '93G, author of The Chronic Liar Buys a Canary, has won several awards, most recently a National Endowment for the Arts/Maine Arts Commission poetry fellowship. She teaches poetry at Emerson College and is the editorial director at Calypso Communications in Portsmouth, N.H. She lives in Kittery, Maine.

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 '76 was working full time in magazine publishing when she enrolled in graduate school at Sarah Lawrence and earned a M.F.A. in poetry in 2000. Her first book, Sleuth, was published in 2003. She lives in Manhattan. "Rethinking Regret" is from Sleuth, copyright © 2003 by Elaine Sexton. Reprinted with permission of New Issues Press, Western Michigan University.

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