I’m still trying to figure out why she posted the 2003 poem about changing priorities, and what she was trying to convey, and to whom?
What exactly did that little old lady on the cruise ship teach her?
All of it is pure speculation, of course, and much of what I get from the poem contradicts what she told me earlier this year, especially when it comes to her husband and the band.
She said her husband always accused her of cheating on him, but she never did.
She said she was disgusted by the members of the band, who were always been misogynistic around her.
The poem implies that the old lady steered in a new direction at that time when she was with her husband and the band, and perhaps she has always been open to the idea of using any means possible to advance her career. But in 2003 the situation changed somewhat.
The poem’s opening talks about some people being one play ahead of other people, having advantages when it comes to satisfying demands.
She is not part of the privileged class, those lucky people who get escorted through life, while other people struggle: all in the same boat, although she uses the term yacht – an allusion to the cruise ship on which she met the old woman, who talked her into a new way of life and taught her what she needs to know, a little woman who gobbles up “brothers and sisters,” perhaps an indication that the woman is black.
The brevity part still puzzles me, but may well describe some of the encounters, brief and with her male partners not really there, insulting even. But she knew all along in an early way seemingly indifference,
while she wore out her daily planner.
“That planner I wore thorough (the laughed one) was full of more than laundry lists and the to do’s.”
What she means by “the laughed one” is beyond me to figure out.
There is the sense of remote encounters in all this, strangers that she seems to have referred to as “figures of destiny,” who eventually “enclose you,” while she thought she was the savvy one.
This poem haunts me more than all the rest of her angry poems, because it dredges up images of my own encounters, my ex-wife’s daily planner with the strange men who paid to be with her, or the calendar on the stripper I used to date with the first names of men filling in every day for months in advance, some of whom were regular customers.
Posting this poem at this point makes no sense, and I’m surprised she hasn’t taken it down the way she did Trickle Up, unless she is trying to tell someone something, perhaps someone who she wants to make clear true love is not in the cards – at least, not yet.
Maybe this whole interpretation is wrong, as was my interpretation of one of her poems last spring.
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