In "The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window,"
the quote
She thinks she remembers listening to
her own lifebreak
loose,
means something to the
effect of breaking the chains that bind her to other people's definitions of her and her
life: her children, her two husbands, her mother, her father, the "other women
hanging," "of all the women she has been, of all / the men." It also means a breaking
of the chains that bind her to her grief for the "lost beauty of her own life." Her life
breaks away from counting it in the palms of her "children's hands" and seeing it
reflected in the faces who "scream out from below" or "pull their children up like
flowers" to protect them.
The quote signifies that somehow,
in the horrific moment of hanging there from the thirteenth floor window, with the
memory of big men saying "Get up. Get up," she is freed from others' tyranny over her
being. Therefore the ending of the poem doesn't present only the inevitability of the
crash down thirteen floors but rather it also presents an
"or":
or ...
she climbs back up to claim herself
again.
The "or" allows her to
climb back up into the window and be a new woman who can somehow see herself and her
life as something different from what can be counted in children's palms and seen in big
men's and hanging women's reflections.
No comments:
Post a Comment