Few poems she’s posted to date have been so complicated or so haunting as the one she posted today, a poem that reached down deep into her own subconscious in a way maybe even she doesn’t fully comprehend.
The poem is thick with Joyce-like internal monologue, referencing things that are beyond my comprehension, and for large portions I am stuck guessing at their meaning and their relationships. Some, I confess, are beyond my comprehension altogether, and ultimately, I am speculating as to the meaning of some of its pieces.
The best I can do is sum up those parts I think I get and then take a flying leap into hazarding what the rest could possibly mean.
On one level, the poem is a reaction to news about someone who has tried to commit suicide by leaping out a window and was unlucky enough to have survived.
The poem involves four people: the poet, her lover (who has called her on the telephone with the news), the leaping man, and the girl that inspired his leap.
On another level, the poet is evaluating the emotionlessness needed to handle the situation, which she “hardly had time to realize it was a situation. “and is making a comparison between the circumstances that led up to the man leaping out the window to her own situation which she calls a mess. She is also apparently surprised at the reaction of the man on the phone, and perhaps more than a little bit put off by him.
“Who threw themselves out the window?” asks the emotionless voice, as she envisions “a man roundabout my own age.”
The use of the plural “themselves” is very significant as is the comparison of her age to the leaping man.
This is not just one man leaping, by in some respects, it is also her making the same leap – or, at least, wishing she had the courage to do so.
She opened the poem by making a comment about her (them?), “laughing it off, this mess,” suggesting that the relationship she has had with a married man (and referenced in previous poems) that went on the skids in the last poem has been brought into a different perspective with this news of an attempted suicide.
“It is time to stop laughing at the emotionlessness required of those in our situation,” she writes, and seems to compare the emotionless reaction to the suicide by the man on the phone (who she thought she knew) to perhaps the emotionlessness he (and perhaps she as well) had in dealing with the disaster of their own relationship. She (the poet) after all has contemplated a similar leap in the past and the news of the leaping man and the reaction by the man on the phone may have refocused her in that direction – i.e., what if the falling man had been her?
She questions the kind of judgement the man on the phone and perhaps others are making, and whether they have the right to make those judgements about the falling man (and by implication herself).
Are not people – including all four involved in this poem – entitled “to a private struggle without the judgement we have no right to make?”
The poet wonders if this is some kind of test to see how she can handle these things. The man on the phone – her one-time married lover – praises her for not falling apart or fleeing, and managing to sound sympathetic,” while she sees this lack of emotional response, this building walls against emotion in her mind as a failure.
It takes some doing, but she manages to separate her “situation” from the leaping man’s, concluding the whole thing is not about her, but about the leaping man and the girl he apparently leaped over, concluding she is still alive, still breathing and still coping.
She has passed test, alluding to yet another level of the poem, her failed relationship with the man on the phone, and as suggested earlier, her own feelings about suicide – which she had considered more than once while on the roof of the building where she lives.
So far, so good. But now comes the hard part, other more confusing aspects of the poem at which I can only guess.
The poem opens with the curious phrase “laughing it off, this mess.” suggesting she and the married man had come to an understanding about their failed relationship, reached “together” a second calm.
But then, he calls her with this news, and it seems to bring back the pain of her break up with him, and in her head, she makes the connection between the leaping man’s misery and her own.
But she is struck at just how unsympathetic her former lover is in reaction to the falling man, side of him she’d not witnessed before, tying their “private world” between them into this other situation, which she is expected somehow to handle.
In other words – if I am guessing right – something about the man on the phone’s reaction to the suicide disturbs her, and he doesn’t seem like the same person she fell in love with, an odd jarring moment from a man she thought she knew.
It appears that the falling man is not someone she knew, and yet the man on the phone has dragged her into the situation emotionally, the leaping man being around her age, alive on the ground when he clearly wanted another conclusion, finding himself waking up in a different kind of hell, with broken limbs as well as a broken heart – while the man on the phone calls the leaping man lucky, something she finds offensive.
She sympathized with the leaping man, who had finally worked up the nerve to make the leap only to have fate deny him the outcome he wanted. She seems offended by the emotionless reaction to what is clearly a tragic event (tragic being ironic since the leaping man did not achieve his purpose) and this somehow tied to her own situation, her own feelings, perhaps her own sense of emotionlessness in her breakup with the man on the phone.
The poem raises the question as to whether she should have felt more or taken the next step, and the bigger question of what might have happened if she did and she also ended up where the leaping man did, in a hospital instead of on the other side (wherever that may be) – the need to be emotionless by “those in our situation and his – as he only is.”
She is critical of the man on the phone (and perhaps of herself as well) and society that passes judgement on the falling man and others like him, when everybody is entitled to their private struggle without other people judging them (and by default, her.)
All this, of course, raises some of the issues from many months ago, when she was poised on a roof top, contemplating a similar leap, and perhaps how I mishandled it, not understanding that private struggle which was hers.
Her poem suggests that the man on the phone admired her for how well she handled herself, when she in her mind saw her reaction as a failure, finally, ending the poem by separating the two situations, hers and her lover on the phone, from the leaping man and his girlfriend.
She is not the one on the ground. Somehow, through all the emotional turmoil, she has managed to survive.
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