The poem she posted a couple of days ago (and I’m just getting to it now) raises some serious questions about my poetic conclusions over the last few months.
It is possible that I may have mistakenly attributed all of these poems (from keeping her love locked in her head) to her most recent posting to the same married man.
In her most recent posting, there is one line that raises other even more significant questions as to just how far this romance progressed, whether or not all or some of the poems are directed at one man or several.
None of these things changes the fact that she is in a downward spiral, approaching emotional disaster, which she is well aware of yet unable to avoid.
Whom ever this man is, she clearly has fallen head over heals in love with him and may be forced to alter her poem from last August in which she claimed to have loved only four people in her life – that number is clearly five as of today. And this love appears to be slipping away.
The whole affair is like a slow motion train wreck, which is part of the meaning of her current poem.
She would clearly like to get the whole painful experience over with if it has to happen, rather than wait knowing that it is going to occur whether she wants it or not.
She says she prefer an unexpected pain “a quick knock on the head” that throws her down at it rushes past. This comes with that delirious time it takes to catch up with what just happened, then picking herself up afterwards “blurry and apart.”
But that’s not what is apparently happening to her at the moment.
She knows it’s coming, a countdown to disaster. There is too much time to think about I before it actually occurs
It tests her moment by moment, leaving in her mouth the “acrid taste of fear.”
She tries to convince herself that she is strong enough to handle it when it comes, about to “suck it up” but then remembers what is about the transpire, “undodgeable,” like a bullet propelled through the air straight at her head with her name engraved on it.
Even then, she tells herself she can look away. Yet – perhaps out of vanity – she needs to look – perhaps fascinated by its approach.
Here, we get the line that I mentioned earlier that comes out of the blue, but suggests just how far this relationship transpired before hitting the skids.
She thinks about the engagement gone wrong “thrust upon your finger that points to towards the pain.”
This has so many potential meanings that is makes my head spin. Perhaps the man she loved was engaged to someone else, and in the midst of the conflict, he accused her of trying to break it up. It could possibly even mean that he may have proposed to her, giving her an opportunity to once again “buy the farm” as she once said in another poem about marriage.
My best guess is the former rather than the latter, implying a much more chaotic affair than her earlier poems indicated.
Since I do not believe she would fall for more than one man with such intensity in such a short period of time, I’m going out on the limp to suggest my assumption the man was married was wrong and that he was merely engaged, making the whole situation even worse, a battlefield in which the two women vie for his attention, and gradually, painfully, he decides to go with the other woman.
But if an earlier poem is accurate, she had her chance, and blew it, stalling until the moment passed, perhaps because of some indignity of his, and since then, she has been struggling to get back, and has watched what once was slipping away.
As with many of my attempts to read between the lines of her poetry, I may be dead wrong about all this – just as I was wrong when I interpreted her poem about truthing last year.
She is clearly in turmoil. She doesn’t want to let go of him, has pleased with him, has become enraged with him, has become resigned to her fate with him. We have reached the point where she realizes the worst of the pain is yet to come, and she lives in dread of it, even as she attempts to brace herself against it.
She appears conflicted, wanting to get on with it so that she can get on with recovering from it, while at the same time, she also appears not to want to let go, knowing that once she does, the whole thing is truly over.
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