Wexler's poem plays a small trick before it has even started. Its title, "The Million and One Mistakes," is not really a title in the usual sense. It is the grammatical subject of the first line, so the sentence only completes itself once we reach "are not your biggest mistake." The poem therefore opens with a mild letdown. A million and one mistakes sounds like a catastrophe, and we are told at once that it isn't the worst thing. The worst thing, the speaker says, is that you are "on the verge / of repeating them."
From there the poem becomes a study in self-persuasion. The speaker addresses "you" throughout, in a casual, buttonholing voice full of verbal shrugs: "after all," "anyway," "of course," "So why not." Each phrase sounds like the next step in a reasonable argument, yet the argument is quietly absurd. Because past mistakes "didn't destroy you / the first time around," you conclude that they never will. This is the logic of the gambler, or of anyone who has survived a risk and decided that survival is proof of safety. The phrase "consciously this time" matters here. It suggests that repeating an error on purpose turns it into a choice, as though knowing what you are doing made it less foolish.
The form carries this tipping-over feeling. The poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no regular beat, in eight tercets that read like someone talking aloud. What stands out is where the stanzas break. Several end on words that cannot stand alone: "because, after all," then "So why not," then "by that one." The sentence is left hanging over the white space and has to be picked up in the next stanza. Reading the poem means repeatedly stepping off a ledge, and the layout enacts the temptation it describes. The short lines also isolate small words. "This time" sits alone on its own line, which makes the hope in it sound a little too bright.
The most interesting moment is the question "who can differentiate / a mistake from its opposite, / whatever that may be." The speaker pretends to be philosophical, but the offhand "whatever that may be" gives the game away. He cannot even name the opposite of a mistake, so the category begins to dissolve. If you can't tell mistakes from successes, why avoid them? The poem then pushes this further with the cheerful idea that you might "get it all right / this time / without even trying." The casualness of "without even trying" is the sound of rationalization at its most comfortable.
Then the mood turns, and the closing stanzas are where the poem earns its sting. Everything so far hinges on "provided, of course, / you are not stymied / by that one." The slightly stiff, comic word "stymied" gives way to a flat, definite phrase: "in a million mistake / that does you in / for good." Here the title comes back with a twist. A "million and one" mistakes is a heap, but "one in a million" is a rare event, and I read the poem as folding the two together. Among all those repetitions waits a single one that is different, and it is the one you can't recognize ahead of time. The final words, "for good," work in two ways. They mean permanently, and they also hold the very word the speaker could not define a few stanzas earlier, the opposite of a mistake. Finality and goodness are crammed into one short line, and the poem stops there with no moral and no comfort.
The poem is significant because it avoids lecturing. It could have warned us to learn from our errors. Instead it lets us listen to the voice that talks us out of learning, and the voice is persuasive precisely because it is so relaxed. The speaker does not sound reckless. He sounds sensible, even kind. The unease comes from recognizing that tone, since most of us have used it on ourselves. The poem suggests that the real danger is not failing but the story we tell afterward, in which surviving once starts to look like being immune.