She posted one of her most thought-provoking poems to date, somewhat remote in tone, yet raising a number of possible interpretations.
It is impossible to say for certain whether she wrote the poem back in 2003 or wrote in currently looking back at one of the most significant moments of her life.
I tend to believe the former but based only on circumstantial evidence such as the different in type style from her usual posts, and how similar the type is to other poems she had reprinted from an archive of poems she wrote and posted in the early 2000s to which I lack access.
Of all the poems she has written to date (with perhaps the exception of Trickle Up which she removed), this is among the most honest, and therefore painful, and possibly painful for her to write.
Why she chose to post this poem now may well have to do with what transpired back then. As is the case today, she was in 2003 trying to reinvent herself.
Back then, at age 24, she envisioned herself as attaining greatness (her bio thick with all the classic stuff of childhood prodigy, able to create “complete art” at age three, a fluent reader at age 5, a brilliant performer from an early age as well.
But just when she reached what should have been the first stepping stone on meteoric performing career, she found herself trapped, and the poem appears to be about a sudden, dramatic and unexpected change of direction.
Although she married that year and sent out on what should have been a great musical honeymoon, the poem suggests that it wasn’t her husband that significantly altered her life that year, but an old woman she met while performing on a cruise ship, “a strange little thing,” who tended to “gorge herself on brothers and sisters,” and who talked her into doing something, and taught her how.
She doesn’t say what it is, although did disclose that she was indifferent to it even from an early age and claimed that she wore out a planning book that contained more than just a laundry list and the to-do’s.
A complicated poem to say the least, it has a number of levels.
The poem opens with an extremely erotic image of a “a pair of poised lips,” “dangle like the fruit, delicate, red,” “Sincere and demanding.”
She appears to be standing on the wrong side of something she wants, needs but doesn’t have access to, the “how to manual” is inscribed in code, and is coded for those who are already ahead of her in the game.
She doesn’t have an “entourage” to shuffler her through, leaving her and others like her in the same sad boat to feel it out.
She uses the word yacht which implies class distinction and a certain level of envy about other people getting what they want when she can’t.
“I used to hate them,” she says in the poem, likely referring to the privileged people who are in advance of her.
Meeting the old woman changes all that, as she learns what the old woman knows.
Then, she meets the old woman at a time when she was performing on cruise ships, and the old woman taught her what she needed to know.
The meeting changes the direction of her life.
She had just gotten married and is living the artistic life she’s aways dreamed of, and yet she feels trapped.
At this point in the poem, she uses an odd phrase.
“I called in brevity, and he was at a meeting, insulting but…”
This may well be a metaphor for the brevity of life, such as you only have one life so you might as well go for it.
Brevity might also refer to her husband and her seeking to get something from him that she needs or wants, but he’s too busy. The term may also symbolize her lack of satisfaction with his performance as well as his inattention which she called “insulting.”
The poem suggests that she is “indifferent” to what the old woman has to offer, and perhaps she’s leaned that way all her life.
Then, she plunges in a new direction, wearing out her planning book full of the names of people she is scheduled to meet.
“Figures of destiny unclear.
This poem strongly resembles her more recently written Trickle Up poem in that she is not expressing shame of what she’s needed to do but stating reality matter-of-factly. She clearly expected something out of all this that did not occur.
Her imagery is powerful, painting herself perhaps in the opening as a doe-eyed, purse-lipped inconsequential soul staring up at the inaccessible dangling fruit, sincere and yet demanding., confronted by a locked treasure chest she lacks to combination to open.
The poem is made up of three stanzas. The first describing something she wants but cannot get, possibly success, fame or attention, yet beyond her reach. She does not have the code to open the treasure chest.
The second stanza details how she is not part of the in-crowd, having no entourage to shuffle her through so that she like others have to feel it out, even as she hates the elites.
The second stanza also introduces her to the old woman that “liked to gorge on brothers and sisters< and taught her what she needed to know to get ahead.
In the third stanza, she called on “brevity” and found him too busy, leaving her to fend for herself, taking the old woman’s advice, and doing things she’s not particularly averse to doing to get ahead, wearing out her planning book filled with the names of “figures of destiny.”
But in the end, she really doesn’t find herself better off, the huntress becoming the hunted, and they enclose her.
As with the poem about trickling up, this poem seems to be an effort to justify what she had done to advance herself, but also with the cavate that it didn’t work out the way she planned.
Again, we get the sense that she has come full circle, ending up where she began and has to start over again, a wearying concept, yet as one of her previous poems pointed out, she doesn’t feel shamed by her actions, since ultimately, it’s all about survival.
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