A blue ribbon prize June 21, 2013

 

 

 

 I wrote about this poem about a year ago when she first posted in in May 2012, and I’m most certain it is the second people she wrote about our temporary boss, and further shows how she trickled up from me to him, and in this is a more direct suggest that their relationship went beyond celibate friendship, although not yet definitive proof.

As pointed out in my previous observation, he appears to be curled up beside her in bed, a reassuring presents she claims as a blue ribbon, and whose voice she was uncertain about when he first became boss. She had asked me about him, questioned how roughly he had treated her, as if he needed to put her in his place, a cub, while he played boss.

“What does it mean?” she asked me. “Why is he singling me out?”

His tough boss attitude might well have been a cover for his attract to her, something I believe she fully understood even when she asked me about it.

The voice of reprimands she first encounter, yet she says she could not tell if it was good or bad or indifferent.

“Or worse, of no importance,” she wrote, when clearly she needed to feel important and bring him into her world, having him curl up against her, this prize she so much sought after and finally won.

The tone is the poem is not arrogance, as I thought when I first read it, but of relief of finally finding someone who legitimately cares about her and interpretation I did not make when first reading this a year ago.

Back then, I was too cynical to believe he meant anything other than the next step in her trickling her ay up the ladder to personal success.

There is great weariness in her words, and a sense of peace in having his body against her, the world – her world – wearing away, but more slowly than she does, implying she has grown weary of all the conflicts.

This is the poem that eventually made me want to confide in our Temporary boss, telling me that he had experienced some of the same issues with her that I had experienced, and that he had taken on the role as he protector, something other poems suggested she craved, while at the same time, she also desperately needed to feel strong and independent in her own right.

There is too much a gap between her posting this poem in May 2012 and the love poems she posted earlier this year to believe he is the subject of the later poems as well.

Although he still remains her confidant, his close relationship  seemed to wain when he was forced to step down as temporary boss when the real boss returned from her maternity leave – something I suspect she expected and why she also developed a relationship with the owner around this same time.

This is not to say the poem lacked sincerity. If something I learned after a year of reading and writing about her poetry is her ability to mean something until it comes too inconvenient at which point she stops.

Since to date, she seems not to have posted additional poems that reference him, I assume she moved on from him, partly because of the seeds of mistrust I sewed when I talked to him about her, and she began to question her need of him even as a mentor.

But at this point in time, she sincerely seems to admire him, a first prize ribbon who curls up against her in bed, protective and attractive, someone she won over and for that moment, instead to keep.


email to Al Sullivan

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