The rain that we expected over the last few days have finally arrived, and I sit in my car listening to the rain’s nervous fingers tapping on the hood as dawn’s pink fingers grip the still unsullied edges of the world as day hoists itself up out of the dark of night, and I wait out the remaining hours before taking the long drive north, back to the dog eat dog world I left to come here.
I’m still foggy about what has transpired over the last year; I only know it has transformed my life, bringing change I did not expect or perhaps did not desire either.
It has imposed on me a terrible vision of the world I can’t get out of my head.
I keep thinking back to the poem she wrote about me and my eye patch (a poem long since removed and perhaps forgotten), the sense of hope she had back then, with the one important caveat, “Don’t try to save me.”
She could not back then know how I would read and reread those pages, that poem, and those that came before and after, almost a religious experience, and how later, even during the worst of it, how our poems became a kind of conversation, often extremely painful, as re reading them remains to this day, part of a continuing struggle with some objective that still remains unclear.
Now as we come to the end of the conversation, there are bad feelings that won’t go away, the personal wrapped up in the political that sometimes becomes unbearable.
Her most recent poem is all about failure, and about trying to overcome it again, as she has had to do so many times before, her poem searching for a reason to this repetition, looking to assign blame – our arrogance forcing up her defenses, and perhaps to some degree it is true.
And she falls back into the same quagmire and has to start to drag herself out again, clawing her way back, the way she has every other time.
No writer is consistent in recollecting events that lead up to any given moment, and this is partly true with her, even though she has tried to document much of her life in poetry and sometimes prose, as if to make sense of something that makes no sense.
The most consistent thing about her is her writing – those stories and later poems – which show just how much she lives inside herself, how she needs to tell herself that she is “right and true” in doing all she needs to do to survive, and how the “you” and the “all of you,” in her latest poem have nothing for her, the deception being that she has already taken what she needs and wants from us, so that we have nothing left to offer.
For all of her amazing talents – singer, writer, teacher, actor – she still can’t put the pieces together to make her life work.
In some ways, she’s like a school kid who cheats on tests, not so much to get ahead scholastically, but for the desperate need for the hollow accolades, only to find out what she got in the end isn’t what she expected and doesn’t understand why, continuing to cheat even when it becomes clear she doesn’t have to, her talent more than enough to get what she wants and needs with real accolades for what she has honestly accomplished.
I don’t know if she intends to quit, or has already, or might continue on as she has been.
But it is clear, the game is ruined. And even if she manages to win, she loses, and nothing anybody can say – least of all me – will make a difference.
No comments:
Post a Comment