Sunday, May 26, 2024

Calm after the storm November 2013

 

In what might fall under the category of the calm after the storm, she posted another poem that light that makes reference to her trip to the Sandwich Islands earlier this month, a kind of metaphor to life here and the more idyllic life she experienced out there.

She opened with her experiences in the urban landscape of the “angry noises of the street,” and the dirty smells, and the cold concrete, and her need to ingest caffeine in order to deal with it and the “frantic din that was her mind.”

Here, she alludes to what it means to be a pretty women in such a place, victim of “cackling catcalls” that tests her sanity.

Then, in the second stanza she talks about the rolling ocean, the discrete  tumbling over a soft, sparkling shore, the strength of the environment as indicated by the stately palm trees, which she personifies as they whisper promises in her weary ears, of a life of love that might wrap around her, providing her with comfort and a faith in the infinity of sound.

The comparison between this life and that life is obvious as she contemplates some other, more peaceful existence than the one she is forced to live with on this side of the Pacific. That life elsewhere allows her to live in peace.

But the poem is part of a larger picture. She has come to yet another threshold, an end of one road, or perhaps a crossroads where she must make a choice, a change of direction.

The romance she’s been involved since the beginning of the year has come to an ugly end, and she has even less reason to remain where she is, doing what she is doing.

The desperate attempt to reinvent her public self seems to have sputtered out, and it appears that she will have to find a new place, a new bath, embracing once more who and what she hopes to become – while looking back to one brief moment in the sun with or perhaps without the lover from her other poems.

While I still ponder over the identity of her lover, it is a heavy relief that for the most part, I am not a target of her poetry.

For her, this is one more dashed hope. The Pretty Woman thing she may have hoped to help her stumble out of the dark life to which she must now again reluctantly turn, unless some other options appears.

If there is an end in sight, it does not seem positive, unless she finds a place of ultimate peace.

In some ways, this poem is more terrifying to me than those that preceded it, and all of these recent poems are very painful for me to read.



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