A penny for your thoughts? May 6, 2013

  

We come back to where she was last fall, if for different reasons, down and out, not in Paris, but in her own misery.

So, it is not surprising that she would post a poem to her oldest and dearest friend in Haverton, apparently someone she always turns to when her world falls apart, someone I went into more detail in journal entry last fall and mentioned in previous journal about her searching out my website.

This is a friend she grew up with, greatly admires, and has come to trust.

This explains the drastic shift in tone from her previous poem, trading extreme bitterness for intense tenderness and affection.

She has nowhere else to go, so she goes home – not to her biological family, but to someone as closer or closer than her biological brother.

This poem is a lot like a letter home (even though by all indications, she actually made the trip to see him).

She is playing off the old cliché of “a penny for your thoughts” converting this to how much of a collection of pennies she’d have for each time she thought of him.

She’s poor so she can’t afford much more than a penny for “every time I think of you or see you or witness you in your endless, beautiful action.”

He has quiet moments, too, she says, but these are rare, since he has so many things he can do, thinks that serve to protect him against the ills of the world.

She calls him “more than perfect” just the way he is, how he expresses in affection “inside the crease of his brow,” and how he bears the burden of others (including hers), a broad-shouldered Atlas, who is weary with the effort, but tells himself he loves doing it.

She mentions how his voice changes when he lets his defenses down, exposing how scared he sometimes gets, and tends to deny “the fact that you have needs and wants,” which he reluctantly begins to accept – if only to make her happy.

This passage suggests (and perhaps I read too much into it) that her relationship with him is not completely platonic, and while they are friends of the most sincere sort, they may also comfort each other physically, something she may encourage out of sympathy and legitimate compassion.

She admires his humility as well as his talent, knowing he could boast or seek material success, and yet does not. She notes how deep in grease his life is (working some fast-food place as noted in my journal last fall), serving people, and how he will sometimes stop, lie down in the strangest places, such as the floor “where those you serve have sprung from.”

This is an odd expression, perhaps implying that he’s better than the people he serves.

She admires, too, his odd gestures, fingers to face when he is thoughtful and when he thinks nobody is looking.

The intensity of her admiration comes partly because he is someone who is always there for her when she needs him most and comes at a time when she is down and out in a way she hasn’t been in years. She needs him to reassure her again.

Yet surprisingly, her breakdown differs from some of those she suffered in the past. She is still employed. She has not fled to some remote location. She still lives where she lives.

It is hear heart that needs repairing, and she is reaching out to the one person she is confident can repair her.

Although the tone of the poem is extremely positive, it clearly shows she had hit rock bottom.

She apparently wrote this after having gone out to see him last week, and come home with the still-warm feelings of having see him, a letter of gratitude, although it is uncertain how long she can maintain he temporary repair with all of the mounting pressure of her job and her shattered love life.


  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