Safe for the moment March 20, 2013

  

The poem she posted today is among the most tender love poems I have seen her post to-date, more evidence suggesting she is indeed in love.

As in many of the poems I have seen so far, this poem expresses her duality, the person she is inside, and the person she projects to the outside world.

She lives inside her head, building a barrier to the outside world – as indicated in previous poems – to keep her real self safe.

In this poem, she comes to realize that insider herself living has become a big part of her life and didn’t realize that there was any other way of living, except living to survive, until he sat down beside her.

The poem’s setting is most likely her apartment with its series of windows along the southern side, first on her coach, and then her bed with an afternoon sunlight pouring over them as they make love.

This poem is clearly directed at someone in particular, someone in whom she has confided perhaps some of her deepest secrets, someone who has offered her calming advice like a sage.

“I felt your breathing, so, I felt my own breathing,” she writes. “There was this body next to my body.”

This is someone she has come to trust, someone she has let into the citadel of her mind, someone she feels safe enough to risk being hurt or betrayed.

There is a sense that this person is older than she is, if not drastically older, then someone who is wise, to whom she is attracted, and most likely the same person she wrote her previous poems about, a married man who clearly makes her happy.

He offers her advice as to not let her own thinking drive her crazy – words filling the empty spaces – ironic, she says, most likely because he is conveying this through words – but it does it so “beautifully,” she is compelled to listen.

Also ironic is the lesson he gives her about “missing the moment,” when for most of her life she has struggled to live moment to moment.

By filling those outside spaces with words, he says, she risks losing that moment of rare calm and quiet, and perhaps more importantly, that moment when these two bodies embrace, warmed by slight pouring through the window onto them and the bed they lay in.

The poem essentially says that she is so busy protecting herself from the outside world that she comes close to missing the rare opportunity to share something special with someone she loves and who appears to love her back.

The poem evokes a sense of safety and trusting, a sense of mutuality and common purpose, and of understanding.

She gives into him, embracing him body and soul, as if for the first time she has found someone who fully understands her, and is capable of slowing the pace of what in other poems she has called her hamster brain.

 

  2012 menu 


email to Al Sullivan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hoping for the best June 24, 2013

Image
        I feel sorry for everybody involved in this trickle up game, not just the so called victims (we walk into    these things with our eyes open and are taken advantage of only because we have our own lusts we can’t control), but also our poet, who knows no other way of life, and must abide by the rules of a game she finds herself stuck in – and must do what she needs to do in order to retain any sense of self-worth. This is what she is, and this is what she must do. But even at her worst, her poetry suggests she is hardly the rascal the congressman’s PR person makes her out to be. She plays the hand of cards she gets dealt. She sometimes misreads the deck, such as assuming that her chef friend in New York was competent, when he was anything else but that. She also leaped onto the bandwagon when it came to our former temporary boss, assuming he could do more for her than it turns out he could, his temporary condition making him of little more use than a...
Read more

Ships that pass in the night July 9, 2013

Image
  A mentioned yesterday, there is more going on in regard to her latest poem than just the content. Again, we come to the possibility that our posts are somehow some kind of secret communication, wishful thinking on my part, of course, because I know she really hates me. I suspect I am deluding myself with hopeful thinking that she has maintained this one thin thread of communication between us, though this poem adds increasing evidence to that illusion – since I posted a poem that in some respects foreshadowed the one she posted this week. My poem included a video of me wandering a small beach in Jersey City near Liberty State Park, and was intended as a response to even earlier poem about borrowed lives. The poem goes I find no path among these river stones, so I make my own, turning this way then that, side steps that lead me nowhere, then back, my life made up of clumps like these small eddies filled with seaweed and people I need, but never see again when I move ...
Read more

Take me to the river July 7th, 2013

Image
  I'll go into the possible inspiration later for this poem she posted today for now she is once more delving into the concept of a row isolation and the struggle to retain strength during several years of adversity her geography is located next to a river named after Henry Hudson as she draws on an important metaphor for life as she lives it similar to an earlier poem that had her kneeling beside the sea in order to let things go, she can no longer retain in her life the wide Hudson with its never ending ripples sits on her doorstep a safe place she goes to breathe new life into her war worn bones and hot raw nerves she goes to the river side to keep from bursting what she is full to spilling and to avoid leaking out and wasting the essence of survival she cannot afford to lose the last few years she says have been truly deep and rough like the storms that rip across the river at times I'm strong she writes but sometimes I'm tired on the shore she watches the ships...
Read more