Careful Hanging Careless

You may not care for the spot she is heading for but you must admire the route she takes. This is the conclusion to a poem:

In the sun's wake I almost succeeded in becoming
a boy, fastening myself to a tree limb, then to solitude
then to loneliness, then to nothing at all.

It is from "The Woman Question" in All-American Girl by Robin Becker. What is gripping is of course the progression of the tricolon. And what is haunting is that the ending picks up the image of boy and tree which earlier in the poem was the object of envy: "When I was a child, I wanted to be the boy across the street / who hung upside down from a tree and didn't care / that his shirt fluttered over his bare chest." The memory makes the intimations of mortality all the more poignant. And recollected in a reversal the nothingness, the loneliness, the solitude becomes grounded in a fastening, a clinging to not just memory but to a desire to inhabit the body without inhibition, to be free.

And so for day 294
04.10.2007