Her latest poem truly reflects the place she has arrived at finally, a taking stock moment when she has escaped the mania of the Charlie Chaplin factory and yet has not fallen into the waking slumber of dull routine.
This comes just as she has been elevated to special aide to her Virgin Mayor, his personal public relations person, a position she knows won’t last, a temporary limbo from which she will be trust if she even sneezes too hard.
She has been in this space before, and from the tone of the poem, she seems to have forgotten just how peace it is to be in transition, neither caught up in the constant hubbub that real life seems to require or not letting life waste away with pointless routine.
It is clear that where she has wound up is not somewhere she intended to be, and yet, she needs to appreciate this in-between time, knowing it can’t last, also knowing that soon she will have to make choices that plunge her back – either into the trickle up she needs to get ahead, or to settle for something mundane, and she has to choose before her moment of peace expires.
But it is clear, she’s already chosen; she knows the life she needs to follow. She is not made for the endless routine, and in the past has always leaped into the fray, even when ultimately it drives her crazy, even when it ends up back where she began.
The poem open with a sense of sweetness, the pleasant aspect of that moment where she is between the two extremes, still feeling the impact of the fast lane life, which has been momentarily halted, or as she puts it “where the push and pull still stays, but it stayed for a time,” a moment free of hostility, safe, which is an unusual condition for her.
It is a fragile moment, too, because if she breathes too deeply, she might get pushed out of this cocoon, this womb-like space from which she knows she will eventually be reborn, and in truth, she cannot stop it, a blink of an eye, gradually pushing her out “the flows of the ‘no’ and ‘hurry’ and ‘rush.”
And before she realized it, a huge chunk of her life has passed. In the poem, she uses the time frame of a year, which is nearly exactly the length of time she was employed at our office.
This moment of pause, however, is very precious, and fleeting, and she needs to keep her eyes open even as they begin to tear and the world blurs – and even that slightest of movements begins to propel her out, in one direction or the other.
The idea of choice is central to the poem. Yet it is also part of the tragedy. If given another option, she would clearly like to remain in this limbo, where there is peace. Unfortunately, that’s not an option. Even those unintentional movements, the unconscious things she does, push her out.
Peace can never last. It is always too fragile, too incorporeal, with no more substance than a spirit or some manmade element that lasts only as long as the energy is applied.
She must move and doesn’t want to.
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