I keep coming back to the same place, even though I started out thinking one thing about a particular poem, only to find the poem may have a different and more nefarious meaning after all.
Each new posting makes me reevaluate what I thought before, and threatens to toss whatever I initially though into the proverbial trash bin.
What I sometimes see as a self-righteous if not openly hostile tone of some of her most recent poems, may not be at all accurate, including some of the assumptions I’ve made about the poetry’s meaning, leaving me in the unenviable space of not knowing anything at all.
So, I have to assume her world is not the way I see it, and that I haven’t a clue as to what is really going on – just guessed that may coincide with personal prejudges – and that somehow I got screwed in this whole mess, when I’m the only who may have screwed her.
The only thing clear is that I’m seeing a dramatic shift in tone in her more recent poems.
It is impossible to know for sure to whom some of these poems are written, and perhaps a guilty conscience makes me assume they might be written to or about me.
I don’t even know if these poems are written to the same person, or different people, thought I can’t help getting the nagging feeling the nastier of these recent poems were written with me in mind.
Even though I already speculated on one particular poem, it seems to demonstrate a sharp shift in emotion, displaying negative and positive, and some sense of instability.
Yet her ability to be indirect in her writing leaves a lot open to interpretation – and later, possible deniability.
And this poem I’m reexamining takes a giant step back from directness, and the tone, less blunt than a poem or two earlier – which she likely wrote in rage and now seeks a calmer approach, needing to establish a more reasonable even suggestive voice, that does not sound so fanatical or final,, desperate or angry -- as if she regretted losing control.
While I would like to think this poem reverts back to a more hopeful place while she suggests there might still be a connection (between us or whomever, possibly her ex-lover). But the poems posted more recently previous to this imply a much darker, and as I reread them and others I get the impression they are less affectionate or hopeful than their surface meaning sometimes implies.
This poem, however, seems determined to regain control of her emotions, but not out of any kindness or affection.
The poem itself has suggestions of this reversion, as if trying to explain how she came back from the brink she brought everything to in the previous poem, and ironically, she claims she has come closer to clarity.
I originally assumed there was a romantic tie in, that love had come into her life unplanned, blurring the line between her dreams and reality, and then it went away.
But the poem may also be a reflection of her hopes and ambition, and how close she has come to achieving them, and how it is this perception of possibility that continues in her veins to give her hope for the future.
While it may be about her failed love that continues inside her, but also this sense of self, this idea that she has come close to getting what she wants, lost these, and yet still retain the afterglow of possibility.
The rage of previous poems gone or put into suspension as she looks at what she has and what she might still have in the future.
While it may be someone who has done this for her, light a fire inside her that continues to burn, it may also be her ability to survive.
This feeling feeding her and keeping her fed, at a time when things have not worked out as she’d planned.
And out of all this, she can see a bit more clearly, and that, too, provides her hope.
There is no blame in this poem the way several of her other poems had. And while I still think the poem may well be a wave of good bye to her failed love, it is also a promise of better things to come.
Fortunately, in looking back at this after reading her bitter poems (some apparently aimed at me) I can’t find a trace of myself in this one, and that’s a relief.
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