I was surprised to find the poem “Why Regret?” in the new volume of Galway Kinnell’s poetry. I had just been thinking about regret on Sunday while driving to the airport on my way back to L.A. from Oregon. I don’t know why it came up, maybe it was because I was in my old-stomping grounds, where I grew up and made so, so many blunders, as adolescents and teenagers have a proclivity to do. Maybe it was because I always have second thoughts after I speak in front of a crowd, immediately have a hundred different thoughts about what I could have said better, or why didn’t I say thank you to so-and-so, or tell a good joke or story, or slow down when I read, look up and smile at the audience, etc.

When the word “regret” passed through me my first thought was that it was such a small and pitiful emotion, that it was the forerunner of guilt and remorse and shame, all of which have the power to rend a human being helpless in having any kind of happiness in their lives. Oh, I’m not saying that we should bounce along doing all sorts of nasty and self-serving acts, have no sense of the harm we cause others by our actions and feel we completely deserve to get off scot-free. I fully agree it’s important to own up to where you’ve let others down, brought suffering or just plain been a jerk. You could say it comes down to semantics and I guess I see regret as another one of those heavy stones that you put in your sack of woes and drag around with you, along with resentment, hurt, grudges, etc, until you can’t walk, can hardly stand up straight anymore.

Reflection, realization and responsibility all seem to be more productive “re” words to me in healing and moving on in life. I love that Kinnell’s poem never once addresses the question of “Why Regret?” directly. He shows us everything to not regret, beautiful, tender, wild, images that fill us everyday with wonder: “ironworkers / sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable” and “the wren / and how little flesh is needed to make a song” and “pinworms as some kind of tiny batons / giving cadence to the squeezes and releases / around the downward march of debris.” If we must regret (and I believe it is possible to not), then regret only a little, only a fraction of what you have beheld in life, maybe three per-cent, at most five. For the other, the ninety-five to ninety-seven look around, inhale, reach out, swallow, lie down in a shallow stream, look into the eyes of a child, meditate so deeply you forget where you are and who you are. These are places where regret and guilt and shame do not survive. This is joy. This is the “mayfly struggling free,” the monarch’s “inner blazonry.” This is waking in the night to, “find ourselves / holding hands in our sleep.”

Galway Kinnell

Why Regret?

Didn’t you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren’t you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn’t it a revelation to waggle
from the estuary all the way up the river,
the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
Didn’t you almost shiver, hearing book lice
clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
Webster’s New International, perhaps having just
eaten of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of the world whose sub-substance
is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn’t it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
broke open and the imago, the true adult,
somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
the swarm, mouth-arts vestigial,
alimentary canal come to a stop,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid’s ink and slid the stuff
out the window, telling his startled companion,
“The perfected lover does not eat.”
As a child, didn’t you find it calming to imagine
pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn’t you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren’t you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and their offspring’s offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn’t it outdo the pleasure of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

Galway Kinnell
Strong Is Your Hold
Houghton Mifflin Company, Publishers