Ship wreck June 10, 2013


 

I keep going back to some of her older poems partly because they reflect clarity that her most angry poems lack.

I also like the fantasize that she is talking to me in some of these poems, even when I know the poems are not about me, a kind of progress report on her inner being only great poetry can provide, and even when some of the poems express deep emotional turmoil, like the “down” poem she posted last month.

The poem seems to sum up a love story that has been ongoing for months, where she clearly has lost herself, unable to steer her life in any direction, defining the intense sadness she feels over losing someone who might have become the love of her life.

It is a heart-wrenching poem, even when she manages to disguise some of the anguish in metaphor, and in the aftermath of the shipwreck of a romance, she seems lost at sea.

I’m tempted to translate this as a comment on her life in general and her inability to get what she set out to get, but it is clear this is a poem about watching someone she really wants to be with drift further and further away, even as she desperately seeks to clutch it – it slips out of her grasp.

The poem seems to define her life and her inability to control what happens. She is no longer steering towards some desired goal and doesn’t understand what is happening.

Again, I’m tempted to paint this in other terms, as if a comment on plans she’s made only to have them fall through – which in truth is what the poem is about, only it’s not about trickling up, but about her inability to hold on to what may well be true love.

In the poem, she says she has become conscious of time’s passing – while at the same time, time moves so slowly.

This possibly means that she sees herself as aging. She is about to turn 34 and may see this as her last opportunity to find the kind of love she wants.

Time can be agonizingly slow as well, especially at those moments when all hope seems gone.

She goes on to talk about how her life slips away from conscious control, perhaps habitual patterns that are ruled by unconscious desires, when it is clear that she has struggled most of her life to have control of the direction her life takes, but now it is “out of my fragile, weakened hands.”

This seems to revert back to something she said in an earlier love poem when she left the whole matter in his hands.

Now, there is a whole ocean between them as he drifts away.

Ocean also seems to serve as a metaphor for the vastness of life, too overwhelming for her to control, despite her staring it down, trying to envision its entirety when such is not possible, and she is soon overrun with the incoming ways, floating above herself – almost like an afterlife image.

“Floating above the swirling turbulent mass of liquid dream”

Again, she refers to time and her inability to control its pace, clinging to it as if clinging to driftwood, and the harder she clings, the more it slips from her grasp

She is pulled down by the undertow, unable to halt the inevitable, unable to breathe, only to wake up, confused as to who she is, who she and he were, and what they were to each other, all lost to the vastness of the sea, the liquid dreams, all she thought she knew lost in the “unforgiving, relentless sea,” all washed away, all that she thought was real is now far away.

Love like something on the horizon she knows she’ll never be able to reach.

This is a slightly different interpretation of this poem than I had when she first posted in in mid-May, but I’m still convinced this is about her failed romance, and how he and she have drifted apart, despite her best effort cling to hope it would not.

What she wants continues to evade her, and she is set adrift, having no control over who she is or where she is going. She certainly can’t get back to what she had before.

There is a deep thread of despair in all this. She had obviously made assumptions that turned out differently than she expected, or perhaps, relied on her lover to have the same depth of feeling for her as she clearly has for him, and now, life seems to lack meaning for her.

Her use of the sea as a metaphor has a number of implications as she stares out into the waves: love is out there somewhere, beyond her reach.

One would extend the metaphor slightly and claim she has been in a shipwreck and all she has left are the scattered, floating remains of the romance she once so intensely longed for, and yet when she clutches at these fragments, even then bob away from her the more desperately she grabs for them.

She seems to compare the affair to a dream from which one day she is abruptly woken. Was it real? Did it ever happen?

In an earlier poem, she talked about preserving her own identity, a decision that ultimately led to the dissolution of the romance – a choice in this poem she clearly regrets, because in the aftermath, she has lost a sense of who she is, and questions what exactly they had together in the first place.

I keep coming back to this poem because it seems to conclude the series of poems that started with her lust of him (and whether she should act on that lust) and continued through a point where she had to decide to surrender herself and her identity, and to a final scene of her watching her love drift far out into the sea beyond reach.

This poem also defies some assumptions about her – which painted her as a master manipulator, a black widow whose soul purpose is to trickle her way up to positions of power.

This poem shows she clearly can’t get the one thing she craves most out of life: true love.

 

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