Nearly four weeks after her birthday bash, she posted a poem
that is nearly a throwback to the much more uncomfortable time before it.
And I can’t figure out why.
But this is not a poem of command the way her poem on
forgiveness was, demanding and indignant.
This is not a poem about accepting fate as her poem was
about quick sand.
This certainly is not a poem about condolence as her poem
about compassion appeared to be.
This poem isn’t angry so much as bitter and seems to be
advice to herself on how to cope as if she still feels she is being pressured
from outside.
Since it comes at a time when I have been utterly compliant,
it is difficult to understand how it would be aimed at me.
And yet…
Put together with her sometimes chilly greetings at the
office and the owner’s questionable search of my computer, I can’t help thinking
I somehow still pose a threat to her.
The poem opens with the need to find a way to cope, that the
tension will “melt away” if only she can keep her mouth shut, implying she
might have said something that inspired an attack on her, causing her heart to
once more beat madly in her chest.
If she keeps her mouth shut, she says, her heart rate will slow,
and her mind will cease its worrying.
“It’s easier that way,” she writes.
It is also easier not to “take” so that “they” can’t take it
away, take what she claims she clawed her life to get.
There is a possible dual meaning in this line, one
suggesting she has clawed her way to get ahead in life, the other that she
clawed for her life – meaning survival.
She also acknowledges a threat of some time, claiming “their
stares” shoot through her “to the raw quick.”
This is a curious phrase that has a number of meanings. To
be deeply wounded or distressed. But it also refers to the soft tender flesh
below the growing part of a fingernail – which may refer to her clawing.
The quick also has an older meaning referring to those who
are still alive, as in the quick and the dead.
She tells herself that if she doesn’t look back at those
staring at her, they might be there. But they always are, and she advises
herself in the poem to remain “closed and calm.”
The poem clearly is an effort calm herself. You get the
impression that her basic character is savvy and street smart and has been
through this before.
The whole purpose of the poem seems to be a reminder of what
she needs to do to survive.
The poem does not make clear what the threat it, only that
someone – most likely more than one – is seeking to take something from her
that she has “clawed” her way to get, and in this, she tells herself if she
didn’t take it in the first place, they couldn’t take it back from her.
They are always watching her, and by inference, judging her,
getting under her skin with their stares, and even though she pretends they
aren’t there, they are, always, and her only defense seems to be staying
silent.
There is a manic tone to the poem in that the speaker is
seeking to calm another part of her that may well be in a panic.
The poem is structured around four uneven stanzas, forced
calming in the first, taking and being taken in the second, awareness of being
watched in the third, and finally returning to the theme from the first stanza
in the last by advising silence.
Who “they” are, she doesn’t say. But the use of “then” takes the poem beyond a
single person or stalker but lumps a number of people together as a malevolent
force determined to deny her what she believes she’s worked hard to get, a
force that makes her feel bad or guilty about herself. And won’t go away,
leaving her only the option of silent endurance.
As with all of her more complicated poems, the more I read
it the more I get out of is, sometimes coming up with a different
interpretation when I do, and this is very much the case with this poem.
Below is another somewhat different interpretation of the
same poem.
In some ways, this poem reflects her most recent thinking so
far, and should somehow reflect her current feelings – perhaps about the new
boyfriend she told us about recently.
As with her last poem which gave an accounting of her life
up till then, I’m hoping this poem has nothing to do with me (but as said
earlier I’m most likely included in the pack of wolves.) After a month with no
communication between us, I had hoped she had moved on.
In this poem, we get a slightly different narrator from her
previous poem, sone less in third person looking back at her life, but someone
speaking to herself, giving herself advice as to how to get through some current
crisis. She is looking over her shoulder at people who are pursuing her. She is
trying to calm herself. The other self she is speaking to is apparently upset
and scared, in a panic over these perceived enemies. The speaker of the poem is
telling her how to stay calm. The speaker is extremely practical, telling her
other self to shut up and in silence can hold her own.
This comes at a time when she – for some reason – became
colder and more distant. She made no effort Tuesday to communicate as she had
the previous Tuesday, raising the prospect that I am indeed included as one of
those she is looking over her shoulder about. But it is clear from the poem, I
am not alone.
The line “stares shoot through you to the quick,” echoes a
false accusation she made against me, true possibly only when we first met, but
certainly not over the last three months. This raises the question as to
whether she also means someone else at the office or someone maybe even outside
the office.
This panic seems to be growing in her and may be tied to
incidents mentioned in her previous poem about looking back when she said
things were good for five days but on the sixth, they were not.
Why not?
The tone and content of the poem suggests panic and a
deteriorating situation, perhaps some major disappointment from a week earlier.
The setting has to be some public space – since people stare
at her. I am guessing the office, but it could also be some social place, a bar
perhaps where she hangs out where “they” get to stare at her. The poem was
posted on Saturday rather than her usual Sunday or Monday posting, suggesting
that the crisis grew out of the week prior, giving strength to the connection
between this and her previous poem and that mysterious sixth day.
The previous poem posted on Monday seemed to reflect the
sleepless night on Sunday. This poem, however, seems to portray an ongoing
series of events – not just one. People staring at her, seeking to take away
all she has “clawed for.”
This suggest I might be part of crowd, not the central focus
(I hope) and seems to center of something that happened at the office during
the previous week. Since she has moved up the food chain, she clearly fears she
might lose what she has gained.
If outside the office, some relationship may have soured --
especially when the mayor of one of her towns got indicted.
But then, it may come back to me after all since I suggested
in my column that he step down, and after she wrote a story designed to
humiliate that mayor’s chief opponent, and the opponent claimed he liked the
story.
The central purpose of the poem, however, is an effort to
calm herself by developing a strategy for dealing with perceived attacks by her
enemies, “don’t talk”, talking gives her enemies something to use against her.
Sometimes she talks too much, such as to the other writers,
and especially to the office gossips. She, of course, did not know I had over
heard her mocking the politician, yet it struck me during that conversation
that she alluded to a poem I once wrote about her in which I claimed she used
her job as a way to build her ego – quoting almost directly from it and
suggesting just how deeply the poem had affected her. She later toned down her
mocking during our staff meeting as if it occurred to her, it might make her
sound biased.
Some of this must have occurred to her when writing the poem
since the message was simple: keep your mouth shut and other people can’t hurt
you.
The poem achieves interesting irony by contrasting soothing
phrases against harsh one such as “clawed” vs. “melts away.”
In fact, the phrase “Melts away if you keep your mouth shut”
is an odd metaphor almost like chocolate melting in your mouth, a savoring of a
drug that allows the heart to calm down and the mind to soften.
The repetition of the word “take” in the next stanza is
significant, instead of “give and take” we get “take and take,” and “clawing”
alluding to being in a cat fight or dog eat dog world where only the tough survive.
The use of clawed suggests that she cannot get ahead any other way, and yet at
the same time she is not without regret (or remorse as some of her earlier
poems hint.
The poem also reveals her constant struggle for self-control,
force calmness in the face of adversity and the more than a little bit of
paranoia that suggests her enemies are always there.
In the subtext, the poem paints her as a savvy street
fighter, who justifies all of her actions by clawing for her life. More
importantly it implies that she really can’t trust anybody else.
As ruthless as she appears to be and as talented, she is –
as this and other poems reveal – scared and vulnerable, constantly checking
herself to keep herself “on track”, as if the only way she can survive. She
seems to believe she is entitled to whatever she’s clawed to get and is
resentful that someone else might try and take it away.
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