What Might Have Been

Thinking about what might have been in Jane Eyre (and Little Women, Wuthering Heights, Gone With the Wind, and The Golden Compass) last week made me like George Bilgere's poem "Casablanca" even better this week:

Last night I saw Casablanca again,
following it like an old song
as it touched on all the familiar notes
of passion, betrayal, and death,

sweeping me along as helplessly
and willingly as it did the first time.

Once more I lamented
the lovers' lost idyll in Paris,
once more I sweated out with them
the approaching thunder of the Occupation,

and once more I felt the sweet relief
as the Nazis arrived at the airport
a split-second too late

to stop Bergman and Bogart
from climbing aboard the shining airplane
and rising toward freedom in a driving rain.

It's the same feeling I have every time
I come to the end of Othello,
when the Moor listens to Iago's
outrageous insinuations in utter disbelief
before having him whipped and imprisoned for life,

and then embarking with Desdemona
on a honeymoon cruise through the Aegean.

Or when, in the final, grainy frames,
the handsome young President in the open car
kisses Jackie with unabashed vigor,

and all the spectators on the grassy knoll
put down their cameras for a moment
and burst into spontaneous applause
as the limo returns triumphant to the airport.

It's like that giddy feeling I had,
that sense of having stepped from a cave
into a bright meadow full of flowers,
when the doctors announced
that the looming gray mass on my mother's spine
had turned out to be nothing more
than a harmless flyspeck on the negative,

a feeling of pure, high-octane joy
of the sort I haven't experienced
since the day my wife came back to me in tears,

begging me to forgive her
for even considering the possibility
of leaving me. And of course I forgave her,

and held her for a long time
before taking her out to Mario's,
where we like to go on Friday night,

and the waiter brought us to our usual table
and the evening ended as evenings do

when there's been a little too much wine,
and the woman is very beautiful
and a sudden rain makes everything shine.

I especially like how the speaker's regret for his wife is the culmination of the poem, because in so many of the other poems in the volume (Haywire), there's a bitter, cynical attitude about why she left and how useless it is to wish for a different outcome to the marriage.

And yet, I still wish. Do you? Wouldn't you, just once, like to see the young couple at the door of the Frankenstein castle in the middle of the night look at each other and say "why are we about to knock on the door of this creepy place? Let's go." Wouldn't you like to see Romeo mourn for just a few more minutes? Wouldn't it be nice to see Mayella and Arthur find each other and live happily ever after, not even noticing how Tom Robinson lives his life down the road? Well, okay. In Mary Poppins' terminology "Maybe that's going a bit too far" (in the movie Bert replies "Indubitably").

Is it only tragedies that make us long for what might have been? Have you ever turned a story over and over in your mind searching for a way out?