By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

“Mistake” is another word for a working draft we are unable or unwilling to revise, a draft that stands at odds with the story we wish to tell about who we are and what we want. It is a judgment one part of us lashes on another. To indict as having chosen poorly what we once chose willingly is to renounce and dissociate from the substrate of us that did the choosing — a way of denying the stratified richness and complexity of being alive. In a truly integrated life, there are no mistakes — only experience, and the narrative we superimpose on experience to slip between our lips the sugar pill of coherence. There are as many possible stories to tell about an experience as there are ways to paint a cloud, to walk a forest, to love.

That is what poet Brenda Shaughnessy explores in her sweeping poem “One Love Story, Eight Takes,” found in her collection Human Dark with Sugar (public library) and framed by an epigraph from Roland Barthes:

Where you are tender, you speak your plural.

It was a pleasure to read the final verse of the eight-part poem at the catacombs of the Green-Wood Cemetery as part of the live performance of composer Paola Prestini’s breathtaking record Houses of Zodiac, with Paola’s partner Jeffrey Zeigler on transcendent cello:

from “ONE LOVE STORY, EIGHT TAKES”
by Brenda Shaughnessy

As it turns out, there is a wrong way to tell this story.
I was wrong to tell you how multi-true everything is,

when it would be truer to say nothing.
I’ve invented so much and prevented more.

But, I’d like to talk with you about other things,
in absolute quiet. In extreme context.

To see you again, isn’t love revision?
It could have gone so many ways.

This is just one of the ways it went.
Tell me another.