The poem she posted today is among the most tender love poems I have seen her post to-date, more evidence suggesting she is indeed in love.
As in many of the poems I have seen so far, this poem expresses her duality, the person she is inside, and the person she projects to the outside world.
She lives inside her head, building a barrier to the outside world – as indicated in previous poems – to keep her real self safe.
In this poem, she comes to realize that insider herself living has become a big part of her life and didn’t realize that there was any other way of living, except living to survive, until he sat down beside her.
The poem’s setting is most likely her apartment with its series of windows along the southern side, first on her coach, and then her bed with an afternoon sunlight pouring over them as they make love.
This poem is clearly directed at someone in particular, someone in whom she has confided perhaps some of her deepest secrets, someone who has offered her calming advice like a sage.
“I felt your breathing, so, I felt my own breathing,” she writes. “There was this body next to my body.”
This is someone she has come to trust, someone she has let into the citadel of her mind, someone she feels safe enough to risk being hurt or betrayed.
There is a sense that this person is older than she is, if not drastically older, then someone who is wise, to whom she is attracted, and most likely the same person she wrote her previous poems about, a married man who clearly makes her happy.
He offers her advice as to not let her own thinking drive her crazy – words filling the empty spaces – ironic, she says, most likely because he is conveying this through words – but it does it so “beautifully,” she is compelled to listen.
Also ironic is the lesson he gives her about “missing the moment,” when for most of her life she has struggled to live moment to moment.
By filling those outside spaces with words, he says, she risks losing that moment of rare calm and quiet, and perhaps more importantly, that moment when these two bodies embrace, warmed by slight pouring through the window onto them and the bed they lay in.
The poem essentially says that she is so busy protecting herself from the outside world that she comes close to missing the rare opportunity to share something special with someone she loves and who appears to love her back.
The poem evokes a sense of safety and trusting, a sense of mutuality and common purpose, and of understanding.
She gives into him, embracing him body and soul, as if for the first time she has found someone who fully understands her, and is capable of slowing the pace of what in other poems she has called her hamster brain.
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