By far and away her most provocative writing OK with a five
part series she posted during the month of July in 2011 an intense
psychological fiction that raises a lot of questions about her world view at
the time when she just began to recover from her romance in New York and at a
time she scrambled to find a new direction for her life
highly symbolic and very surrealistic portions rival even
images we get from artists like Salvador Dali
labeled as past or present the piece serves as a snapshot of
where her life was weird was at the moment and leaves Owens resolved where she
is going
the piece is gripping in both its realism and its surrealism
painting a picture of the deteriorating past and a seductive yet unstable
present each depicted by characters with whom she has relationships the past with
its uncomfortable decaying scent and images of a deteriorating figure that
continues to control her even to the point of allowing her to Make Love to
another man yet not as a gesture of good faith but one of control he allows it
in order to appease her concerns when he clearly does not care to understand
what her concerns are or how disgusted she is in her remaining uninvolved is
simply a pledge of loyalty that is rapidly evaporating even the man with whom
she makes love is an unsubstantial pleasure yet destined to vanish before her
eyes with the remaining caress oh with that deteriorating man in arranging the
whole thing for her
the piece opens with a very Dolly like image of time
slipping by in the heat only instead of a melting clock it is her melting bones
she depicts
Her world is one of discomfort.
while her past sits deteriorating in a velure armchair
chomping on a moist guitar his sweat stains the chair but he won't climb out of
it accusing her of not letting him even if he had the inclination to do so
constant contact with the chair has caused sores on his grey
skin
This makes her pity him, in what she claims is the first
time she’s felt anything in a long time – something resembling, I think, the pity
she expressed towards me after I got bushwhacked last year for texting her on
her birthday.
Pity and guilt appear to be powerful emotions in her life as
she struggles to find something more, something pleasant, even – as another
poem puts it – holding out for love because when it works it’s fantastic.
She treats his wounds, dabbing them with a cloth, trying to
make him feel comfortable, yet seeming more like a caregiver than a one-time
lover, covering every sore, the man turning from gray to a sickly green, pulsing
like the waves in the window – or as The Doors might have sung, cars go by my
window like waves.
This bit of mercy appears to grow in size and weight, then
tells her he’ll stay longer, as she comes to realize she made a mistake – Mercy
is not always the best solution.
She wakes the next morning to the smell of green roses, and
stumbles into the next room still damp with dreams (This is a sexual image.)
The man had put a slipcover over his smelly chair, smooth khaki
canvas in an apparent effort to become more appealing, greasing his hair,
shaving, splashing Aqua Velva on his face – a image of a specific kind of
classless man, putting on a seersucker suit with a green rose in his lapel.
There is something horrifying in this image, even though the
man would not recognize it as distasteful (much like the white sneakers she
once told me made me look like an old man).
Then, she takes a step back from realism when she describes
the gray hummingbird hovering near the green rose, slowly turning green as it
sucked nectar from the rose and causes the rose to wilt.
This very much suggests that she is the rose that is being
sucked dry by her relationship with the man – as suggested earlier when the man
turned green after she soothed his sores.
Her life with him is turning her as gray as the man was,
She sees the bird as a sign of change, a difficult change,
and once the bird was sure she got the message it flew out the window.
The change, of course, is building up courage to leave – and
it may not be from her New York City lover, perhaps she looks further back to
when she had to break it off with her husband.
The man had a red memory book on his lap and patted the arm
of the chair so she could set and reminisce.
She went to him, but not completely willingly, perching –
again the image of a bird as suggested earlier) lightly, bracing herself in
case she had to fly way.
The book contained a picture of a blonde haired boy who most
likely was the man in the chair as an earlier age when they first fell in love,
arms pinned as were hers in the picture, her face flushed with excitement as
was the boy’s – those days when love bloomed in them.
Although, this may also be a memory of another boy she loved
in the past, someone she regrets having left or having been left.
The man said the boy would return but just for one night,
something she may have seen as a taunt since she wept with anger and
frustration, partly because the man’s manipulation worked and love – despite her
best efforts to stop it – rushed through her.
She began to pace, tripping over the abandoned cologne bottle
on the floor, while raising the man’s complaint for her to keep still. She
glared at the bottle until it started to melt, finally disappearing completely.
Again, we get a suggestion of Dali, since the man asks at
this point about the time.
We get a strong sexual image when she notes the rumbling
coming from the man’s lap, from where he still held the memory book, which
began to erupt with tiny golden orbs. With a wave of his hand, the man sent
these out the window, and on the street appeared the blonde-haired boy from the
book.
Past mingles with present, as the boy dismounts from a motorcycle,
taller than she recalled, now with a shaven head instead of blonde hair, but he
had the same clear eyes
The man in the chair holds up a mirror and the poem give a
description of her with red-brown eyes, black clothing – and she slips into
surrealist image when she says she is staring at his face and her own at the
same time. She gets angry and grabs the mirror, cutting herself in the process
with three drops of red gold blood falling onto her face’s reflection, one of
her forehead, between the eyes, and just where her lips parted.
The man told her to go out and meet the boy, her fate, and
she does, still with the metallic taste of blood from her lip, which she swallows.
The boy outside doesn’t see her coming. She pauses in the
doorway, suddenly reluctant, thinking if she advanced everything would change –
implying not necessarily for the better.
She’s scared and can smell her fright, the kind of fear that
comes with the presence of death.
She edges back inside, then asks if she really wants to go
back to the gray life with the gray man in the chair, when she looks back at him,
she sees a sore reemerging under his lips. Still, she tried to convince herself
to go back, at which point the boy outside noticed her.
Calm came, and the face of the man in chair faded somewhat.
Her legs propelled her slowly towards the boy, and then she
leapt into his arms, his embrace crushing all of the noises out of her, he
telling her how he missed her, while inside of her dead things began to burn as
a blue fire erupted in her.
The intensity of her need is self-evident, having lived her
life slowly being sucked dry of life (green to gray), and now, she finds herself
lusting after renewed life in the shape of this boy, letting him put a helmet
on her for a drive on the bike.
“She could have done it herself, but she let him. She wanted
it.”
The intensity of the sexual attraction is obvious, but
unlike in some of her later poems, this is also flavored with an intense hope,
a desperation to escape a bad situation and perhaps the mistaken belief that
this knight on a motorcycle might save her from symbolically a fate worse than
death, grayness that drains her and condemns her to a life of servitude.
“She grabbed his chest with one hand that was instantly
electrified by sheer contact,” and as they drove off, she gave one last look at
the man in the chair’s face that was shattered into nothingness, as she puts
it.
Then, she wakes later “twisted and sweaty from her dreams”
after having made love with the boy, but she could no longer remember who or
what she was. She didn’t even think she had a body.
Again, we get the scent decaying flower, the gray, once
green rose, although was at a loss as to where she had seen it before, her
feeling of having lost herself, consumed by passion perhaps, with the boy
beside her in the bed, who stretched his beautiful limbs out, and all the discomfort
she felt vanished. She noticed the small green feather on his brow.
Again, we get a reference to time, and the boy’s eyes
growing hard with fear, and he ripped off the bedsheets to check his watch,
then fled, leaving her stranded.
She managed to get to her feet, her body drenched with sweat
from a scalding sun. She once again tried to ride with the boy, but this time
when he tried to put her helmet on, she insisted on doing it herself.
This sudden need for independence echoed again and again in
later poems, though when she put the helmet on, it felt like a girdle and
clutched his back with a desperation she did not like
As they drove home, she wore the same wicked grin from the
day before – although again time eludes her.
She sees the man from the chair’s face reflected back at her
in the boy’s once black now red helmet. She could smell his sores that had reclaimed
his body, his clothing rotting, puss dripping down onto the boy’s neck.
She tried to block the puss from touching the boy’s skin,
only there was no skin, only more green feathers, and suddenly, she realized
they were high in the air, where she found herself clutching the neck of a hummingbird
(an image repeated from earlier that had caused the green rose to turn grey,
draining her). They traveled at high speed and jolted in a number of
directions. The humming bird told her he taking her home.
She screamed at the image of the man in the chair, who in
his gurling voice told her that he had allowed her to make love to the boy,
figuring she needed to have sex, but also that the boy was leaving. She ripped
the helmet off the boy/hummingbird’s head with such force, she and the image of
the man on the chair were propelled into the air.
She panicked, but this lasted only the moment when she
realized the man in the chair was dead.
There was no sound, only the sound of air as her speed increased,
and the sound of the hummingbird wings hovering above her, keeping her cool and
quiet with his blue gaze.
In the last part of the seven or eight part story, she
reverts to the present, opening with a comment on the mating of a particular
insect and the sound it makes (she once claiming she tended to scream when
making love), a sound that protects the insect from its bird predators, and
also helps attract a life mate.
In a sudden shift to realism, she talks about the pattern of
her life, waking each morning to a cigarette, and some of the things she does
to try to sleep, before surrendering herself to a cup of coffee.
At this point, we realize that what had transpired previously was part of
dream, although she’s still unclear how real they might have been.
The coffee winds up even tighter.
She claims the woman is average in almost every way, not too
thin, not to large, not too fit, and goes on to describe her other attributes.
Unlike the author, the character went to a local state college
and procured a degree in business, allowing her to live an un extravagant life
style.
She occasionally goes out with her friends for a drink,
sometimes joined by their boss – but he has twins and a wife at home.
When done with shop talk, she walks two blocks to the bus stop
for her trip home, a place with beige walls and a few paintings. She makes
supper and eats it while watching cable TV.
The story goes on to paint her uneventful life, habits that
are ordinary, and then the noise starts, small at first, like two of three of
those insects, and her hand grips the remote.
This, of course, leads us to question, which was the dream
(or nightmare) and whether she will fall back into that hopeless trap with the
man in the chair.
The first seven parts of this story would suggest that she
is constantly trapped in situations like those with the man in the chair, and lack
of control she has over her own life – a lot of Freudian imagery supporting her
desperate attempts to find independence, only to discover she has been
manipulated from the start, and the last part of the story, suggests a safe, mundane
life over which she has a measure of control, only as in her life until then
and perhaps since, it can’t last.
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