Losing even when she wins Oct. 7, 2012
The rain that we expected over the last few days have
finally arrived, and I sit in my car listening to the rain’s nervous fingers
tapping on the hood as dawn’s pink fingers grip the still unsullied edges of
the world as day hoists itself up out of the dark of night, and I wait out the
remaining hours before taking the long drive north, back to the dog eat dog
world I left to come here.
I’m still foggy about what has transpired over the last year;
I only know it has transformed my life, bringing change I did not expect or perhaps
did not desire either.
It has imposed on me a terrible vision of the world I can’t
get out of my head.
I keep thinking back to the poem she wrote about me and my
eye patch (a poem long since removed and perhaps forgotten), the sense of hope
she had back then, with the one important caveat, “Don’t try to save me.”
She could not back then know how I would read and reread those
pages, that poem, and those that came before and after, almost a religious
experience, and how later, even during the worst of it, how our poems became a
kind of conversation, often extremely painful, as re reading them remains to
this day, part of a continuing struggle with some objective that still remains
unclear.
Now as we come to the end of the conversation, there are bad
feelings that won’t go away, the personal wrapped up in the political that sometimes
becomes unbearable.
Her most recent poem is all about failure, and about trying
to overcome it again, as she has had to do so many times before, her poem
searching for a reason to this repetition, looking to assign blame – our arrogance
forcing up her defenses, and perhaps to some degree it is true.
And she falls back into the same quagmire and has to start
to drag herself out again, clawing her way back, the way she has every other
time.
No writer is consistent in recollecting events that lead up
to any given moment, and this is partly true with her, even though she has
tried to document much of her life in poetry and sometimes prose, as if to make
sense of something that makes no sense.
The most consistent thing about her is her writing – those stories
and later poems – which show just how much she lives inside herself, how she
needs to tell herself that she is “right and true” in doing all she needs to do
to survive, and how the “you” and the “all of you,” in her latest poem have
nothing for her, the deception being that she has already taken what she needs and
wants from us, so that we have nothing left to offer.
For all of her amazing talents – singer, writer, teacher,
actor – she still can’t put the pieces together to make her life work.
In some ways, she’s like a school kid who cheats on tests,
not so much to get ahead scholastically, but for the desperate need for the
hollow accolades, only to find out what she got in the end isn’t what she
expected and doesn’t understand why, continuing to cheat even when it becomes
clear she doesn’t have to, her talent more than enough to get what she wants
and needs with real accolades for what she has honestly accomplished.
I don’t know if she intends to quit, or has already, or might
continue on as she has been.
But it is clear, the game is ruined. And even if she manages
to win, she loses, and nothing anybody can say – least of all me – will make a difference.
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