Is this poem a glimpse of what goes on behind the veil, the intensity of her isolation?
For some reason, it makes me think of that moment last April when she went to a local bar and picked up a man who had been accused of rape and made love to him, out of sheer loneliness, so overwhelmed by being isolated that anybody – regardless of whom or the danger they pose will do as long as she doesn’t have to go home to that empty space and to spend a night or life sifting through the pieces of collected admiration than with flesh and blood with whom she can really make love.
This is a poem inside the head of a woman who is evaluating her habit of collecting and needing kindness she can’t get in arrogate, stitching real love out of many fragments, and somehow pulling them together, whether it is a stranger or a meaningless person she brings home to fill the emptiness.
I might suspect this might me a reaction to some of my angrier poems that previously passed judgement on her, criticism of her trickling up – but frankly, I don’t think I’m in her head at all at this point, and that this poem like the previous few involve someone she may legitimately love, and hopes might love her back with the same intensity.
In some respects, many are attracted to her superficially, but move on. It is the people who try to hide their attraction, unaware that she can see it, assuming their passion is concealed. The small gestures, the glimpses of smiles. She is very aware of these, like a gold miner looking for nuggets in a stream, plucking them out before they pass out of sight, passing judgement on herself for her desire.
The poem suggests invisibility on a number of levels and a strange game of cat and mouse, as those who admire her attempt to keep it from her and yet unwittingly give themselves away.
She is sifting through them even when she brings them home, greedy for even these pieces when she clearly wants the whole.
This is a poem obviously written to a particular person, just who is hard to say, certainly not aimed in my direction at all, even though she uses many of the same phrases she once used with me.
There is a kind of Heisenberg effect here, in that the person it is aimed at is likely reading the poem.
Heisenberg once postulated that someone’s observation of the game changes the game being played and the mere observation affects the outcome.
This is true for the man who she is writing this about, as well as for someone much more remote such as me.
As usual, she tends to use her poetry to say things that she might not otherwise say openly, leaving it up to the interpretation of the observer to define its meaning, taking away from it in some cases what we bring to it, each reader assuming the poem is written to him or her, and thus reacting to it on a personal level, while – as she puts it – she remains unseen.
No comments:
Post a Comment