In the duck soup? April 10, 2013

 

I barely caught up with her last poem, when she posted another.

Since I could not print it out this morning, I had only a vague memory of it as I went through the day, getting the impression that, while not exactly positive, the poem reflected a brief respite in the sequence of poems in which she still struggled with her apparent relationship.

She clearly wants to save it.

The poem, of course, returns to a well-established them of “the moment” and in this case, finding a period of time when she has set aside the worries of her life and is basking in the glow of “now” rather than the past or what might occur in the future.

While not completely devoid of resignation, the poem suggest acceptance and being in a good space where she can look out from a more objective view point, and has found temporary peace, but a piece from which she will eventually emerge and plunge back into the emotional turmoil of her life.

She doesn’t matter, neither do the things that should nor do. She finds herself in that moment where she is reminded why she exits – she puts it “why I breathe,” despite herself.”

There is a kind of respect, a view of herself that other people see as melancholic, a hopelessly person.

As said earlier, this is a brief interval where lack of demands, self-imposed or imposed by others.

In this bubble of time, she doesn’t matter anymore, nor do all of the things she and others seemed to think of as important, nothing pressing down on her.

This may be a moment when she remembers why she exists in the day-to-day struggle, and the poem suggests that she is something more than this depressing figure other people may or may not pity.

She has expressed these sentiments in other poems in other ways through her up and down existence, and usually, when she reaches this point, she is usually gearing up for some change of direction, or some new project she may have planned.

The theme – if there is one – is that she has found time to reflect on her life and that she is more than this depressing person.

She may be speaking to her lover or to herself.  Most likely, she is reacting to something he said about her being depressing (but that’s only a guess). Perhaps there she is trying to convince the other person she is not always like that, or that she is capable of change.

Although there is no evidence in the poem to support the setting, it feels like another one of her early morning reveries, when her hamster is spinning on its wheel in her head.

She seems desperate to find hope, just as she expressed similar feelings in previous poems, a glimmer of something she can aim for in an otherwise very dark place and seems to be building a case for herself and her ability to survive, to change, to find a new direction for her life.

She is defying the expectations others have put on her as always depressed or hopeless, making her argument that she can sometimes step outside herself, find a peaceful place to evaluate herself, and come up with a more positive image.

I get the impression reading over the last bunch of poems that she is engaged in a conversation with this other more – if not directly to him, then making an argument in her own head, the back and forth and up and downs, and she is still clinging to the hope that what they had between them still exists or can exist again in the future.

This is purely a feeling, supported by impressions rather than anything in the actual text. If this is true, then she really is in -- what they called it in the 1920s – the duck soup.

 

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