Wrong

Everybody’s been wrong. Aristotle.          Lucretius. Tolstoy. You name it. They all     jabbed and prodded the universe’s seams

for answers and came up with diddly-squat          half the time. As Michael Jordan once said,     “I missed half my shots,” which suggests wrongness

is right in a way. I’m not thinking here          about those serendipitous mistakes     like penicillin, but for-real boo-boos,

like the time you told a young girl she was          the sun, which she took to mean corpulent,     and fled. Imagine we were never wrong:

Wouldn’t our prized humanity suffer          something ineradicable, a loss     of stature somehow embedded within

our very inconsequence? Isn’t it          wrong to be right all the time, to be sure     and sufficient as a stone, inhuman

at the very least, monstrous at worst?          No doubt, the preceding sentence is wrong—     too long, baroque, a bit too self-knowing

(a bit like this one)—but perhaps you sense          how hard it is trying to make itself     a body in this world. Truth is, we’re wrong

just through existing, by being carbon-based          nodes of thought capable of dreaming     eternity we’ve aggrieved the cosmos,

inserting ourselves into this fraught stew          of always-expiring stars and life-forms     that ache, in our eyes, for a transcendence

that transmutes into gold. And, really,          what’s wrong with that? If we are located     at the crux of meaning and nonmeaning,

shouldn’t we revel, in what time we have,          in whatever enlivens our brief days     in our skins? Shouldn’t we, tumultuous

with loss, lose ourselves in this crazed hubbub          that calls itself a world? Isn’t it wrong     not to—not to bite the succulent fruit

of every morning, let the juice trickle          like liquid amber down our throats, and take     a crazy, death-enraptured joy in what

propels us forward into every storm,          which is always the weather of our lives     and is, inevitably, right as rain?