There’s an old saying that if you look, there will come a sparkling diamond from the block of blank coal. In this poem by Lewis Hyde, he shows us how lovers struck speechless when insulting each other, actually are removed forcibly– via their sudden muteness — from saying any further cruel thing to one another. That being struck dumb can sometimes be a good thing. He talks about how a crack in the ice might make the imagined ice fisherman disappointed, but the crack makes it so any otter underwater can surface its nose and breathe. He speaks of the twins who are born with great challenges who wander door to door asking strangers for food… and those learn to care for and about the twins, and how this disturbance of people’s privacy by the twins, teaches many to become true neighbors.
This poem gives us a bit of the oddity or error, and then gives us the end result of that error, one often more useful than might have at first been imagined… not blindly optomistic, but observant about how coal can often become diamonds.
THIS ERROR IS A SIGN OF LOVE
by Lewis Hyde“Man has to seek God in error and
forgetfulness and foolishness.”
— Meister EckhartThis error is the sign of love,
the crack in the ice where the otters breathe,
the tear that saves a man from power,
the puff of smoke blown down the chimney one morning, and the
widower sighs and gives up his loneliness,
the lines transposed in the will so the widow must scatter coins
from the cliff instead of ashes and she marries again, for
love,
the speechlessness of lovers that forces them to leave it alone
while it sends up its first pale shoot like an onion
sprouting in the pantry,
this error is the sign of love.The leak in the nest, the hole in the coffin,
the crack in the picture plate a young girl fills with her secret life
to survive the grade school,
the retarded twins who wander house to house, eating, ‘til the
neighbors have become neighbors.
The teacher’s failings in which the students ripen,
Luther’s fit in the choir, Darwin’s dyspepsia, boy children
stuttering in the gunshop,
boredom, shyness, bodily discomforts like long rows of white
stones at the edge of the highway,
blown head gaskets, darkened choir lofts, stolen kisses,
this error is the sign of love.
The nickel in the butter churn, the farthing in the cake,
the first reggae rhythms like seasonal cracks in a government
building,
the rain-damaged instrument that taught us the melodies of black
emotion and red and yellow emotion,
the bubble of erotic energy escaped from a marriage and a week
later the wife dreams of a tiger,
the bee that flies into the guitar and hangs transfixed in the sound
of sound ‘til all his wetness leaves him and he rides that
high wind to the Galapagos,
this error is the sign of love.The fault in the sea floor where the fish linger and mate,
the birthmark that sets the girl apart and years later she alone of
the sisters finds her calling,
Whitman’s idiot brother whom he fed like the rest of us,
those few seconds Bréton fell asleep and dreamed of a pit of sand
with the water starting to flow,
the earth’s wobbling axis uncoiling seasons–seed that need six
months of drought, flowers shaped for the tongues of
moths, summertime
and death’s polarized light caught beneath the surface of
Florentine oils,
this error is the sign of love.
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CODA: Lewis Hyde, poet, taught at Harvard for a number of years. But his poetry, though eloquent, is rooted not in academia, per se. He worked as an electrician and a carpenter to support himself while writing, and one of his most reprinted essays is called, “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking” (1975) which came from his experiences as an alcoholism counselor. In it he says that trying to live a life heavy on the irony becomes a cage in which one becomes entrapped… in other words, trying to be too cool, will instead imprison the creative life. Not your usual Harvard poet. He’s currently 61 years old.