It is impossible to know what exactly tempted her as
referred to in the poem I wrote about yesterday.
But she clearly wants it, has wanted it her whole life, and
yet, dangling before her, it appears to come with strings attached.
Perhaps a betrayal.
She clearly is stuck someplace despite all that she has done
to win success, dreaming of this thing, screaming for it.
And yet something is stopping her from getting it.
“There lies the shit of it,” she writes.
And then the tossing and turning, the telling herself she
shouldn’t, and yet, pleading with God as to why not, besides all the good
reasons she shouldn’t.
But in going back and forth, she tells herself life is short
and such opportunities may only come once in a life time, and still she struggles,
and denies herself.
Why?
This is a person who had trickled up all her life. So, it
becomes a mystery as to why she won’t take what she wants in this instance, a
mystery as to what is holding her back, besides herself.
There is no way to tell from the text what exactly she sees
as the prize.
A sudden opportunity that popped up in the midst of troubling
times. The other three poems in this sequence talk about despair and failure,
even surrender, and while there are aspects of her struggle in this poem, there
is something else, as if she is faced with forbidden fruit which she wants, but
for some reason is reluctant to reach for it.
As pointed out yesterday, the poem suggest consequences. She
can grab this thing, but not without cost.
This is not really about right or wrong (as I speculated it
might be yesterday). She has clearly moved beyond those concepts as poems from
last spring point out. Whatever is holding her back must be something very potent,
beyond good and evil, right or wrong.
You can almost picture her as a little girl reaching for
candy she wants but knows she shouldn’t have, reaching out, then withdrawing
her fingers, as she think and rethinks the dilemma.
Two of the poems posted after this one resume the surrender
and survival mode, so, it might be safe to assume that she did not obtain
whatever this is she wanted.
We may never know.
No comments:
Post a Comment