The intensity of her sadness grows with each new poem she
posts, stirring up melancholy even in those of us remote from her world.
The poem she posted today – which I will no doubt revisit
again later – continues the painful journey through heart break I would not
have expected from her a year ago, but which has been brewing in her since the
beginning of the year.
I’m not certain that all these love poems (if sad also)
reflect a relationship with one man, although I suspect they do.
But the mood suggests she has become lost in the aftermath
of what appears to have been over for quite some time.
In this poem, she seems to be reflecting on how her past may
influence her future, again caught up in these thoughts during the night, as
the air twists into her mind through her “childhood senses,” remembered quietly,
and “sideways” since she can’t be sure where she is headed any more, the future
lost in some kind of fog, “soft and gray like mist.”
There is a certain relief in that, a reprieve from her usual
anxiety, an “emptiness that sooths” the over-fullness of her past, -- past
repeated several times as if passing judgement while at the same time seeking
to escape it.
Then in a strange phrasing, she addresses someone, perhaps
herself, how she didn’t think she’d be where she is when all of this started, again
resorting to the plural “we” suggesting she may also be speaking to her estranged
lover, life always taking strange twists of fate (to quote Boy Dylan) and her
need to reflect on how she – they – got to this place by looking back to when
it all began.
But how far she goes back is hard to tell, perhaps comparing
what transpires today with what happened since her childhood.
“I sit and squeeze my eyes shut and wrap around the smell,”
she said, echoing a previous poem about how his scent lingers around her when
she lies in bed.
She clearly doesn’t want to be thinking about how it
started, perhaps because of the high hopes she had – if this is about the same
person she thought about seducing early this year – when she began, and the ultimate question of “why”
– as to why it happened at all or why it ended up as it has, and how as she
sits in the night, the breeze brings these thoughts into her mind, then out
again, fading away perhaps.
It is hard to tell if she is relieved or saddened or both by
the experience, and by the loss. The poem, however, continues the theme of regret
and exudes a sense of pain she is not articulating, but only hinting at, as
well as resignation that – as Zepplin might say – what should but perhaps should
never be.
Like several previous poems, she is struggling to let go of
this thing, yet clearly knows she has to, partly because the person of her
desire appears to have moved on without her anyway.
This is not about the politics of her life so much as a
personal reflection, some passing of judgement on herself and her life, yet not
so full of guilt as full of tender mercies, and reading this poem, you have to
wonder if she would do it all again knowing how it all would come out in the
end.
I suspect she would.
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