Ode: On Getting It Wrong
Whatever you were thinking of doing today
There’s no right way to do it, so give up
On that. What are you worried about
You’ll make a mistake? You never made
A mistake before? Mistakes are the rule. Success
Is the exception. Oh, you’ve done it all
According to plan? That’s great. Nobody
Is going to notice. Scientists tell us
The Sun was a mistake, made billions
Of years ago. Or maybe they don’t. Scientists
Make mistakes. California is full of mistakes,
Though they call them “faults” there. Time itself,
Space, the nature of light—these are famous
Mistakes, as we know now, unless we are once
Again mistaken. We mispronounce words,
Especially ones we use only to impress others,
And then of course when we get caught, we think
Boy, was that a mistake. Then the blush comes
To the cheek, one of Nature’s mistakes, where
Just when we try hardest to hide our feelings,
They show up right on our face. Darwin knew that.
He was the first to conjecture that blushing
Is a displacement of arousal of the sexual organs
To an area of the body not covered by clothing,
An instance of evolution of a particular trait within
The history of our species, since humans haven’t always
Worn clothes. Sometimes we still don’t. Or maybe
It wasn’t Darwin. I don’t know. My memory
For things like that is not too reliable. Darwin himself
Made mistakes, some of them notorious, though
I can’t think of one at the moment. (See above, re memory.)
He may have said that all beings, considered over the longest
Imaginable stretches of time—eons, eras—do not
Progress through some foreordained plan,
Or even moved by an innate drive within to improve,
Straining for perfection, as we like to imagine. No.
We don’t do that at all. We fail to replicate
What has gone before, we stumble, something
Unexpected comes in from left field and changes
Everything.
So it seems that the plan all along
Was no plan, just as you’ll live your day today,
Maybe noticing when you get the little things
Right—yay, the sauce came together, managed
Once again not to mix stripes with plaids, the server
Seems ok with the tip—and maybe not, but
Like every other day of your life, every era in
History, pre-history, cosmic infinitude, changing, if
At all, for the better, if we can call it that, by mistake.