(this is the first draft of a journal entry about this poem,
very similar to the final draft, but with some differences that I’m posting it
as well)
I want to believe that her third recently posted poem is a
reaction to something I recently posted, although it remains a mystery as to
why she felt the need to respond if she did – again raising the question are we
engaged in an ongoing conversation or not, and if we are, does she feel this is
the only safe way to do so?
I posted a poem called Hudson River Stories with a video of
me wandering the small beach in Jersey City which was a response to her poem
about borrowed lives.
Although not tied to any story or poem, she posted a photo
of herself further up the coast along the Hudson River, which I – perhaps mistakenly
– took as response.
My poem opens with a frame of seeking solace from the river –
a theme that runs through many of my nature people.
But the river in her poem is more than just a symbol of
hope, it is also a metaphor for her life –since much of her life has been manipulation,
even of those she professes to love, whose hearts she fills and then un-fills
that can be found stranded along these shores, “down and up” the river, and she
compares those she has associated with to ship along side which she has
co-existed.
Coming to the river, she finds new life in the breezes and
the ripples of the water that breaking – breaking having several meanings such
as lucky break since she follows this up with torn bones, a negative such as
broken bones or shattered nerves – “hot raw nerves.”
She comes there when she is full to spilling, an imagine
suggesting that she can’t take any more emotional baggage – bullshit suggesting
the term “leak and waste,” but also can’t afford to use what she needs to
survive this emotional turmoil.
She says the last few years have been tough, alluding to the
life up and down stream along the Hudson – both sides of the river and well as
upstream where she lived previously. She says she remains strong, but
sometimes, she gets weary, and again, using the ship metaphor, she says this
trip up or down river makes her soul ache because she is alone.
She can see a certain face in the water reflected, someone
she loves, but clearly has to release – again echoing several previous poems
about this lost love, that blank face of a lover who she can see and must let
go of.
Again, just who this is remains a mystery, but it clearly part
of the same theme her previous poems alluded to, and I am assuming it is the
same man from earlier in the year, and this poem like those is reaching out to
him, perhaps a desperate effort to bring him back, although deep down she
already knows whatever they had together is over and done with, and something
already sailing away from her.
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