Mistakes

American Poetry Review, The, Jan/Feb 2001 by Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

Next door a child's playing Beethoven's "Pour Elise."

One can hear the mistake, all over and over again.

The dogma of infallibility

was a faux pas. On the part of the parasite,

it's a fatal blunder to kill the host.

It's also called globalization.

Out of bashfulness, the decisive mistake

hides in a dune of insignificant errors,

being drowned by them. There has never been

a dearth of voices in warning that said:

The world is the incorrigible.

Touching attempts at repair, seals, patches,

fillings, reforms, improvements

with red ink and pentimenti:

they all lead to perfectly novel howlers.

Surely congenital defects and abort.

are totally different.

But the work, too, goes amiss,

the request, the color, the start,

the kick and the ignition.

A Milky Way of aberrations

which is surprising. All in all,

what results from it is a miracle.

To avoid mistakes at any price

would be a mistake.

One does concede, does admit

to having slipped up, to have made

a slip of the pen got stuck.

Certain poems, for instance,

would be perfect,

unless a tiny mistake

had preserved them from that lot.

By mistake, one is happy,

at times, for a brief moment,

by mistake. Yet something's missing.