Five times in twenty-four lines, a speaker repeats the same flat sentence: "It's all my fault." By the third repetition it no longer sounds like a confession. It sounds like a stamp coming down on a form. Craig Rozniecki's "The Blame" is about being the designated culprit in a relationship, and about how a refrain can expose an injustice better than an argument could.
The opening shows how the poem works. "Catching her in another lie, / With another man, / Late as usual": the words "another" and "as usual" suggest a long pattern of behavior. Yet the verdict lands on the speaker, and what he is blamed for seems to be the catching, not the lying. The poem never says "because." Each grievance simply sits beside "It's all my fault," and the reader has to supply the logic and find that there isn't any.
From there the list widens, and the widening is the poem's quiet joke. It moves from her own misdeeds to her bad day at work, her mother's firing and her softball team's loss. Then it moves to a blizzard, a flood and a power cut, and finally to gas prices, a flight delay and "a bad waiter." Nobody could be responsible for a blizzard "in March," and the fall from disaster to waiter is pure bathos. The humor is bitter, though. By stretching the accusation until it is ridiculous, the poem shows that blame here has nothing to do with cause and effect. It is just wherever she sends her discomfort.
The form supports this. The poem is free verse with no rhyme, but it has a strong pulse. Most stanzas follow a pattern of three short items and then the refrain, like a litany. Many of the lines are fragments, such as "A flood in the street" and "The power going out," noun phrases with no verbs of their own, as if the complaints were being pasted together. The refrain does the job rhyme would normally do, because the ear learns to wait for it. Its four plain syllables have no decoration, which makes it sound like a verdict, not a feeling.
The pattern shifts in the mirror stanza. Now there are four lines before the refrain, not three, and the speaker turns to look at himself: "I look in the mirror, / See who's to blame." The phrase "all our problems" seems generous, since it shares the trouble between two people, but it is immediately swallowed by "my fault." The break-up is described mildly, as "our parting ways," and the understatement feels like exhaustion. The poem suggests that he has half accepted the story told about him, and that this acceptance is its own kind of damage.
The last three lines change the poem's direction. "Her" in the first stanza has become "you." The speaker stops describing and starts addressing. "You said so yourself, / To rid yourself of guilt" reveals the motive, and the reflexive pronouns loop back on the person speaking, as if preparing the mirror. Guilt, the lines imply, has to go somewhere, and blaming someone else is a way of moving it. Then the mirror returns, now in her hands: "Until you look in the mirror."
That final line is a clause that doesn't resolve. "Until" names a condition, but the poem never says whether it will be met. The ending is also ironic, because the poem began with a lie, and it closes on the one object that cannot lie. The first mirror showed the speaker a culprit he had been told to see. The second would show her what she has been avoiding.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. There is no name-calling and no self-pity, and the speaker never claims to be a saint. The poem lets repetition, an escalating list and one recurring image make its case. It also describes something most readers will recognize, from small arguments to large ones: the person who is always at fault is often just the person who happens to be standing nearest.