Neil Carpathios

Contributing Columnist

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The dictionary defines regret as: 1) to mourn the loss or death of someone or something 2) to miss very much.

Poetry often addresses this human feeling. I tend to believe that the writing of poems serves to help the poet work through the tangled psychic and emotional network of the heart’s pain. At least, that ‘s my experience. The writing of poetry in some ways is a form of therapy. In my own life, I do not know how I would cope without writing poems that externalize some of my deeply imbedded internal baggage.

One of the most intense sorts of regret centers on romantic disintegration. Years ago, I went through a terribly difficult divorce. I survived, to a great extent, by writing many of the poems that ultimately appeared in my first book. That collection of poems stands as both a painful relic and a life-saving document to my eyes.

In the following poem by Michael Ryan, we see such regret at the loss of a relationship in all its wrenching clarity:

In Winter

At four o’clock it’s dark.

Today, looking out through dusk

at three gray women in stretch slacks

chatting in front of the post office,

their steps left and right and back

like some quick folk dance of kindness,

I remembered the winter we spent

crying in each other’s laps.

What could you be thinking at this moment?

How lovely and strange the gangly spines

of trees against a thickening sky

as you drive from the library

humming off-key? Or are you smiling

at an idea met in a book

the way you smiled with your whole body

the first night we talked?

I was so sure my love of you was perfect,

and the light today

reminded me of the winter you drove home

each day in the dark at four o’clock

and would come into my study to kiss me

despite mistake after mistake after mistake.

Address poem submissions and correspondence to: ncarpathios@shawnee.edu or Neil Carpathios, Shawnee State University, Department of English & Humanities, 940 Second Street, Portsmouth, OH 45662. (740-351-3478).