Where she lives June 24, 2013

 

I keep coming back to the poem she posted on May 12, 2012, not because I expected to read in it birthday wished, though I now expect to find nuggets of dissatisfaction with me, and read into it – if not a message to me, then an explanation as to why things went bad at that time, an explanation to herself as to her overall loss of infatuation we’d shared over the previous month and a half.

The poem is remarkable for its lack of bitterness yet still manages to lay out her frustrations with life how she has not yet squeezed out of her existence those things she most desires last year when she posted it for the first time I wrote about it catching only the briefest of glimpses of the deeper meaning she tried to convey this year after having read and reread it many times almost as many as I have listened to her music I get but more of what she is trying to say though most likely 10 years from now after having read it that many more times I will discover meanings that still elude me now.

 

On the surface the poem is about the place she made home in June 2010 after she returned from Europe and after the disastrous situation with her Brooklyn chef turned stalker

it is her sanctuary and yet at the same time the place to which she brings people in the hope that they might become the missing piece of a puzzle she alludes to as love or happiness and yet nearly always fail to live up to the part but mostly go leaving her alone in this she foreshadows some of the themes she more bitterly List in her resignation poem a few months later but the tone suggests her milder disappointment in her hints that there is still hope she might find what she is looking for yet considering the circumstances leading to this moment I'm one of those people she sees going out of her life and that hope lay somewhere else

What I failed to notice in my first few readings is the intense loneliness this poem evokes the envy she feels at catching the scent of shared suppers in the event Things by which seek suggests other people enjoy while she catches with of their shared joy and how they whomever they are get to spend the whole night together so as to also enjoy parting coffee each morning a luxury she aches for yet rarely achieves partly because of the kind of relationships she has often with men who must go home to their wives like nervous Cinderellas who turn back into cuckold house husbands at midnight.

She is apparently acutely aware of time when those men leave those women exactly at 6:00 AM although she lives in one of the wealthier towns in the state she is on the poor side of it bordering an even poorer town across the street where she hears the soundtrack of poor Latino community where cars blast melancholy Latin rhythms from loud rimmed cars and accompanied with the other sound all too familiar in poor communities the sirens of cop cars ambulances and fire engines though she alludes mostly to firefighters from Firehouse is full of men ripped from fake nervous families on their way to settle messes.

These lines seem to have layers of multiple meaning that once again allude to her sense of envy and suggest sexual attraction fire houses full of men ripped from fake families ripped suggesting muscular men and fake hinting at a family, she is not a part of or perhaps men who having cheated on their wives at some point with her and so their love and loyalty is somewhat suspicious this last is a supposition on my part.

The poem describes the enjoy of her current life which sharply contrasts with previous geography and extremely urban world now as compared to the rural world she lived in prior to this and was driven from by fire and other factors love gone bad etcetera her life now is a tale of two cities the big one to the east and a smaller one yet as densely crowded city to the West like something out of a Dickens novel or a song by Simon and Garfunkel she being a rock with her books and poetry to sustain her

again, we get a Cinderella kind of reference with her carefully scrubbed floors but no apparent Prince Charming on the horizon just her collection of books covered with half city dust she does not mention mice but does refer to her to lazy cats.

This place with its six windows would get the feeling of looking out with the world unable to look back in add her through them this place serves as a buffer against the real world a refuge she runs to and at one point in another angry poem aimed at me when she feels the need to lock her doors something that only increases her isolation since locked doors might protect her yet they also make it much more difficult to let someone enter her life.

This space is weird she has cried herself to sleep dampening pillows as she puts it with panicked sweats though fails to mention the sheets, she has also moistened in lovemaking that has not could not be sustained always seeking recourse in various outside sources to sustain it sources that have cured disturbed and captured me until she shook them off and moved away.

She always returned home to find her refuge.

The previous passage alludes to those people she has invested in and in some ways Harkins back two other poems about those people who either run from her or cling and her home becomes a place of safety away from the emotional trauma of search cures often entail.

Select people come and go but always go and in a kind of reverse of the Cinderella story where she seems to hold a slipper, she desperately hopes some Prince Charming might fit

Since she posted this poem on my birthday and at a time when I was one of the people going and at a time when she appeared to set to hook up with our temporary boss and our owner the poem is surprisingly absent of hope of finding anyone who the shoe will fit.

And this leaves open the question as to what defines a home.

Is it a place Where another is?

They – whoever they are—stare out her six windows, at the big city, and the little city, and all that lies between, tell her how nice it all is, then leave, “and forget.”

Home is something she has always wanted and has always eluded her.

Again, the poem hinting of envy over those with “loosely unhewn lives” who seem to have gotten what she lacks, people she observers out of her six windows, hearing their laughter she cannot share in, laughter that alienates her, though when those voices argue, she seems to think how good she has it, people so full of human attributes, “when they scream and cry” that she empathizes and tells herself they might be better off alone.

This is her sanctuary, as well as a prison.

Again, the most ironic park of this has to do with windows through which she and others are constantly looking out, and yet none look in, a symbol of her as a person, who sees but is not seen, envisioning all that goes on around her and yet for all those who come and go remains largely invisible.

Will there ever come a time when someone looks in and sees who she really is, and will that finally be the person who loves her and does not go away again?

 

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