Ashes and echoes April 28, 2013
From resignation to rage is not as big a step as one might
believe.
Taken in the contest of the series of poem’s she has posted
over the last two months, you have to think this is the next step in the ever-deteriorating
situation and what was once great passion has turned into deep bitterness.
Had she posted this poem a year ago after the debacle at the
bar, I would have better as intimidated by it as I was about the forgiveness
poem she directed at me during the summer.
It is difficult to say if the target of this poem feels as
deeply humiliated by it as I felt back then.
Somehow, I suspect not – even though this poem and many of
the previous poems aimed at him suggest that she once perceived him as a man of
great sensitivity.
Again, the caveat here is the presumption that all of these
recent poems were about the same man, and that this sensitive man she fell so
hard for has finally done something
beyond the pale, so that there is no longer a plea to remain together,
but a significant severance, an ax blow cutting off the umbilical cord once and
for all.
My best guess is that he wanted to carry on the affair with
her, abandoning all pretense of love, this despite the apparent drama
associated with his wife finding out about the original affair – as suggested in
some of her previous poems.
Such a concept might have made her feel cheap and used, exposing
finally just how unworthy he was having her in the first place, and now she
wants no part of him.
She wants and deserves real love, and apparently had
mistaken what he had offered as that, only to have the blinders torn from her
eyes and allowing to see what he was all about really.
The intensity of her poem is reflected in her anger as she
states matter-of-factly: “You will not get me” -- and tells him not to try, or
even think about it, or breathe it, suggesting he might say or have said
something about her to someone else.
“It will not happen,” she says. “I am the Phoenix Queen. You
burn me and I will rise again and again.”
Then, she does on to say he will burn as well, then she will
rise, and will burn herself, which will allow her to finally have peace.
There is something very dark in this last passage that stirs
up memories from a year ago, something akin to her roof top episode and the
idea that self-destruction might ultimately bring her peace.
Hurt her and she will hurt herself, and cause him to suffer
the guilt of it.
All this, of course, is pure speculation, and indeed, my
interpretation may be utterly wrong.
It is possible that this poem might be aimed at me, something
reigniting the rage she left over from last fall.
Although I’ve tried to be discreet when inquiring about her activities in the town
she works at, this is a political world where trusted sources broker
information, and often the same people who feed me information are perfectly willing
to feed information about me to others, and might well have taken my inquiries
back to her, reminiscent of the cruel mistake I made last June when I confided
in our former temporary boss about her, something I vowed never to repeat. Although
any question about her political affiliations might well have played horribly
in her paranoia about me.
But taken in context, I think this poem is about her lover,
and not me.
Had this poem come out at the time of her resignation last
fall, I might have concluded she believe me responsible, and might well have mistakenly
believed I was still in love with her, and this poem would have put me in my
place once and for all.
If the poem is aimed at me now, she is blasting me for
something I have not done about something I do not feel.
Rather, I suspect that she has come full circle into a
situation similar to mine with this man. The rage seems to fresh, even if the
points might have once been valid regarding me.
I assume – and this might well be a dreadful mistake in
itself –that her estranged lover has been talking about her to other people,
perhaps a trusted friend, who reported back to her and she felt the need to set
the record straight.
Yet her threat to self-destruct remains uncomfortably
similar to her once-time threat from the roof top after I abandoned her at the
bar, when she expressed a similar rage that reflected the intensity of the pain
she felt then – and now.
Perhaps new pain reminds her of that old pain, and thus the
poem stirs up guilt in me because it echoes something I might have been guilty
of a year ago.
This idea that she can only finds peace by dying remains a
constant theme in her life, something more than tragic, because for all the bad
things men bring into her life, none of us are worth the ultimate price she
might enact as her revenge.
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