Shaking the Dust From Your Shoes, Your Life: Dorianne Laux’s “Antilamentation”

A rarity here, I know, but I’m none too sure I can say much more about this poem that isn’t stark raving obvious and powerful already in its scorching, emphatic admonition to just get the hell out of the way of the life you have lived and come to rest in it. (But that doesn’t mean I won’t try…)

But…wow!

Actually, Dorianne Laux (pronounced “Low”) starts with a “Pow!” in her first two-word declarative sentence that runs us pretty much head-first into the poem’s meaning, message and takeaway: “Regret nothing.”

She doesn’t plunk an exclamation point on the end of it because she doesn’t have to. The line’s brevity and conviction speak for themselves, as both first and last words on a timeless human conundrum.

Any given particularities of regret pale in comparison to just how universally it curls its knobby gnarled fingers around that hollow tree at the base of our gut.

But that’s just the beginning of this compact poem that trains Laux’s wary eye on the human capacity for people to create a virtually infinite number of regrets to carry with them through every stage of life (not to mention any dark afterlife they may be fathoming as additional payment for their sins).

As the narrator, it’s easy to see Laux at the end of a long night’s listening to a troubled friend, second bottle of wine on the table half-drained, the friend getting ever more entangled in the traps her own mind is setting for her.

The poet’s hair is slightly askew from tugging at it occasionally, a largely unconscious preventive measure to avoid an indelicate response to her friend’s revolving cycle of shame—as the hours tick by.

Finally, her eyes narrowing, comes the dead-sure and needed rejoinder, the stern marching order, pared down to the finest piercing point: “Regret nothing.”

Nothing at all, not one of the awfuls that hound my nights, chase me up the trees of my self-doubt, demand that I take a wide berth around any prospective joy?

Nope. Nothing at all. And then the poet treats her friend—and her readers—to some particulars.

Let’s feast on a few of them now.

***

***

   ANTILAMENTATION

     By Dorianne Laux

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering
any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

***

Laux’s imagery here is gritty, working class, the heroine of the poem given to tempests with lovers, “smoky nights/over a bottle of flat beer,” wearing a “frayed coat with its loose buttons” after she’s checked out from her dispiriting job that requires her “to sweep stuck onion rings/across the dirty restaurant floor…”

As it happens, she had her share of such jobs before becoming a poet and professor. They included, according to a delightful interview with her on the “Poetry Foundation” website: cooking at a sanatorium, staffing a laundromat, waiting tables in Alaska, cleaning houses, selling TV magazines over the phone, and her personal favorite: managing a gas station in San Diego. (It’s a good story, and of course she got a poem out of it.)

In any case, there’s no use thinking she’s not writing for everyone, whomever we are. As politicians are so fond of dreamily proclaiming, “We have so much more that unites us than divides us.”

True enough, and one of those things that unites us is our crazies, our seeings “through a glass, darkly,” in the words of another fine poet and breast-beater par excellence, the apostle Paul.

Dorianne Laux

Laux could perhaps have pitched this poem to suburban moms (and dads) and their own crazies in balancing career, kids and spouses—along with all the shortfalls, however small, they take with them into their thrashings of the night. Or elders, even “successful” ones  by societal standards, wincing still at the injuries, oversights and underestimations they’ve caused and endured in the standard gives-and-takes of life, unleavened by the passage of time.

Any given particularities of regret pale in comparison to just how universally it curls its knobby gnarled fingers around that hollow tree at the base of our gut.

But there’s something stark and telegenic about a person walking streets “a thousand times” with “pockets full of struck matches,” and the dramatics of a TV set “pitched out the upstairs/window.”

Not to mention “your red dress and shoes, the ones/that crimped your toes,” and how important it is never to regret those! (Laux has been known to pal around with another poet of red shoes, Kim Addonizio, featured in this space nearly three years ago with “Two Poems About Desire.”  The two wrote a book together in 1997 entitled, “The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry,” and Addonizio took the photo of Laux up above.)

***

The maxim “to each their own” likely applies to regret as well as it does to anything else in life. And just to be clear, Laux urging us to be done with it does not necessarily mean slipping out from under the accountability that might lie under it in any given circumstance. Forgoing regret and lamentation is not the same as never owning up, never saying you’re sorry.

But regret need not, should not, mean lifelong self-flagellation. You were born a human, into the human tangle begat by consciousness, with all its joys and woes and big-time, ain’t-ever-gonna-escape-them errors, wrong turns, contradictions and failures. Some of them spectacular, others just made so in our own minds.

“Get on up!,” this poem tells us. It happened, whatever it was, and in the long rear-view mirror that will hopefully stretch out in every life, nothing, least of all regret, can go back and fix what has been. “Don’t bother remembering/any of it,” is probably too flip by half, not to mention, let’s face it,  impossible. But that brings us to the present, the eternal now, the living of life among other lives, in the endless fascination that each of them entails, heeding this fine poem’s concluding advice:

“Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.”

***

Marion Cotillard disappeared into the role of Edith Piaf in the 2007 film “La Vie en Rose,” which used Piaf’s original 1946 recording of the French classic .

***

Comments? Questions? Suggestions, Objections, Attaboys? Just scroll on down to the Comments section below. No minimum or maximum word counts!

Check out this blog’s public page on Facebook for 1-minute snippets of wisdom and other musings from the world’s great thinkers and artists, accompanied by lovely photography.   https://www.facebook.com/andrew.hidas/

Deep appreciation to the photographers! Unless otherwise stated, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing.

Elizabeth Haslam, whose photos (except for the books) grace the rotating banner at top of page.
 https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/

Library books photo by Larry Rose, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com

Face of regret by Neil Morales, Hemyock, Devon, UK https://www.flickr.com/photos/neilmoralee/

Regret sculpture by Jan Canty  https://unsplash.com/@jancanty

Dorianne Laux photo by fellow poet Kim Addonizio   https://www.kimaddonizio.com/