Highlighting the dangers of assuming her poetry somehow translate into everyday reality, my first attempt to analysis the poem she posted yesterday was a dismal failure.
I’ll take a closer look at what I wrote to see if anything can be salvaged. Meanwhile, I’m writing this one up from scratch.
In some ways, it is an unrequited love poem, similar to previous poems that bemoan her inability to be with someone she loves.
More importantly, it is a poem about her struggle with cancer (alone without the apparent support of her lover), an aspect I missed when I first tried to analysis it.
It is also a description of her self-treatment, another aspect of the poem I missed, a daily treatment that comes close to being a religious ritual, something she is doing in a desperate attempt to save her own life, perhaps having little or no confidence in traditional medicine.
The description is almost clinical and manages to avoid the distasteful aspects of the treatment she must engage in and yet seems to be reluctant to describe it in detail.
But it is clear that everything about this treatment must be precise. So, the jars she writes about each jar contains exactly 16 oz each. Although she writes about filling each jar each morning, she neglects to mention what she actually does with the flues they contain, although in one Facebook post, she put up a picture of her coffee maker with a caption saying “not for drinking.”
Like a nurse or doctor, she writes about how carefully she scrubs each,”21 scrubbings each.”
Then, she takes an even deeper dive into metaphor, picking back up the romantic theme about the disconnect between her and the man she loves.
“I try to clean you, too, because while cleaning I can’t help but wait for a call, a knock, a note.”
This implying she might be able to cure whatever it is that keeps them apart in the same manner she is fighting back against cancer.
This seems to dispel the idea that she is communicating with our former temporary boss as I postulated a few poems again when I thought she might be manipulating him by expressing how great sex had been with him with me assuming she was trying to keep him in his place by pretending she still had feelings for him. This poem suggests she might still be communicating with the lover she’s had the on again off again relationship since the beginning of the year.
The poem reverts to what appears to serve her as a double entendre in implying a sexual relationship while disguising it in aspect of everyday.
Using quotes around the word “Relaxing” in bed as if she implies some other activity that might make her sweat, and not wanting to get sweaty again, trying to keep her cool, “in the one-stream weak plastic breeze” of her two-cent store fan.
This passage also suggest she is still struggling financially – too poor to afford a real fan let alone an air-conditioner. But it also suggests intense loneliness at a time when she is in a panic over her medical condition, when she desperately needs her lover’s presence and comfort.
“I try to breathe the one thousand weak surges of my two-fold panic down into the jar,” aware that her lover won’t be there for her, at least, not on the day she is writing the poem.
Two-fold panic seems to imply losing him as well as the panic involving her cancer.
There is something of a Genie in a bottle reference, but in reserve, as if she might control all these negative things if only she could put the genie back into the bottle, or in this case, a jar.
This poem goes a long way towards changing some of my assumptions about previous poems, especially the poem about how great his sex was.
While I still think it is manipulative, the object is not to placate a former lover such as our former temporary boss, the way I suggested when I wrote about that poem, but perhaps to entice a current lover to come back to her. It is a call for help, trying to let the man – whomever he is – know how intense her feelings remain towards him.
This in intertwined with her fear of dying, and her reluctance to confront her mortality alone. She clearly desperately needs him to be with her in order to provide her with comfort.
Neither this poem nor the previous poem goes into why he is away from her, thought and educated guess on my part would be to assume he is already married (and may well be the same married man she wrote about earlier in the year.)
If all this is true, then her situation must be more tragic than I imagined.
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