Too much to bear March 27, 2013

 

 

(I’m not sure which of these two analysis pieces I wrote first, although they are dated a day apart, so I’m posting both – each has a slightly different perspective on the poem).

 

The inevitable happened, if her latest poem can be believed and if the sequence of poems written about her involvement with a married man are being played out here in this last chapter.

In her previous poems, she held out high hopes.

But heart break, resentment, missed opportunity apparently failed to make it more than just a temporary fling (as she hoped to avoid in an early poem).

The poem is particularly painful to read because over the last two weeks, this was easy to see coming, a train rushing towards her in a dark tunnel with her having no where to run after having made her way into that tunnel in the first place.

She opens with the heart break and how it was not the fact that her heart had become “too, too full” from being deprived for “too, too long.”

Instead, it was her inability to act as the inevitable disaster occurred.

She was the deer in the headlights, frozen where she stood, even as his world fell to pieces with her inside it.

This is something she predicted would happen several poems ago when she contemplated getting involved with him in the first place. What she failed to foresee was his angry reaction, the rubbed raw of his selfishness.

In this poem, she takes responsibility for the disaster that she apparently knowingly inflicted on his life and her inaction in an attempt to remedy it.

“I could not move from where I sat because I felt that more of me would break you, too,” she wrote.

Clearly, the whole affair (which she’d hoped would not become a temporary affair) created friction between them, his “rubbed raw side of feeling selfish” and on her side, her selfish inaction.

She felt she had the right not to respond.

She also took blame for not responding to his need for her to join him in building a new life on the ruins of the old.

She said she “inadvertently” deprived him of “the moment that would have meant the mending of two worlds.”

She had second thoughts and stalled; the moment passed.

She says she “will relive and cringe about it for a long time.”

But it was more than just the conflict of his failing marriage, she just didn’t want to let go of “I” in what likely would have become “we.”

Her repeated use of “too” as in too, too, this or too, too that, implies that the whole thing as just too much to bear.

This is, of course, a breakup poem, but one in which she is trying to sooth him and smooth the waters so she can move on without too much guilt.

 

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