Back on the ash heap again April 1, 2013

 

  

The poem she posted next has a very remote point of view, what seems to be someone making an objective observation, far different – apparently – from the intensely internal poems she most often posts.

The poem is about the ruins nobody pays attention to, the dust swept up by the wind into piles.

It comes off as an impersonal description of an everyday scene, but in reality, it is a metaphor for an intense internal feeling, perhaps a description of the wreckage of her life, as the remains of a demolished building which people largely ignore, not a plea for help so much as testimony to her current condition, in the aftermath of the intense feeling of success followed by an equally intense feeling of failure.

The poem is a snap shot of a ruined landscape where demolition or some other disaster exposed the inner trappings of someone’s life.

Now, after the fact, passers by take little notice of the details, weaving through the ruins to some destination even as the wind mixes and remixes the contents into different piles.

In reality, this poem is just as personal as any of the others as fate stirs up the remnants of her life, reshaping its elements into new piles nobody takes notice of – personal or impersonal which are ignored or missed or considered unimportant to the people who pass through her life.

This poem follows the slowly deteriorating pattern of the previous poems, suggesting that no matter how wind or fate configures her life, she is still living a life of ruin and is a person other people ignore.

She uses the word “smart” to describe the wind, the force that moves the pieces of her life around into different piles.

She uses the word “useless hoards of (im)personal effects – obviously alluding to very personal. The word “effects” is multi-faceted in that means possessions, properties, belonging, things, but also consequences and impacts, and implies that her life may be useless, or at least what she has used to base her life upon.

Other people steer away from her, avoiding or ignoring these things, and by default, avoiding her.

Her use of “hoards” rather than “hordes” is significant, implying her collecting or stashing what she considers Important things in her life, as opposed to a large amount of possessions as the sentence would otherwise imply.

The smart wind may well be people who have used her and have cast her aside, or perhaps, people she held out hope for, who reshaped her life only to build piles that strongly resemble what her life was like before.

These smart people stir up her life only to abandon her, leaving new piles amongst the junk and other useless things.

People, smart wind or others, then blindly weave around her as if she did not exist.

She is unimportant, useless, missed by nobody, left among the leftovers of some attempted construction.

Each time she rebuilds her life, she ends up here, piles of personal stuff at the foot of the construction stuff.

The poem implies that her life has fallen apart again, another smart wind has blown through her life, stirred up passion or hope, only to leave her – another sad little pile in the dust.

This is clearly a low point that reflects a huge disappointment. After the high hopes she had expressed in earlier poems (the lust, the chances taken) and then the predictable falling apart, she is once again among the wreckage, possibly reflecting the man of interest from the early poems, being not as nice as she first thought of him (the surprising revelations of the Falling Man poem or even the rawness of the breakup poem. The smart wind has gone and she’s back in a pile amongst the debris.


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