Hannah Andrews - One of Two

I chose this poem because it was inviting. Not inviting in an "open arms" sense, but it inspired my curiosity. It seems that much modern poetry is intentionally elusive - one step or imaginatively removed - but One of Two provided me with a much-needed door ajar.

The poet is expressing a dual self and the conflict produced by the recognition of this polarity. She writes: "all I could picture was a second self,/me as coin tail, sure that in the moment of the split, option b sidles/off & joins all the other discards in a slick landscape, lush with/what our safe halves have given up." The duality seems to be a product of the endless possibilities (what's given up) and their conflict with the "safe [half]," what's been attained. The safe half is the realm of the established: her relationship with the individual to whom the poem is addressed, their "Savannah kitchen", and her daily role(s). To reconcile this conflict she visits her life in a dreamscape: ". . . last night, I went incognito & found myself in our Savannah/kitchen. We were cooking just the way you imagined us. There was/nowhere else you had to be: time sprawled gorgeous & the icebox/sweat pearled delicate. I don't want to tell you how I saw my own/face, as I squatted into the pantry for cake flour, eyes cast familiar,/a long look toward somewhere else." Through this description we (and the poet) come to reckon the conflict. She visits her own (safe) life unseen. The addressee has nowhere to be, time is theirs, the kitchen is theirs, living up to its urbane utility, and then she captures her own eyes. "eyes cast familiar,/a long look toward somewhere else." - she discovers her own eyes searching. Searching for something else. She is incomplete and the "safe" life/self doesn't amount to what was promised. Her eyes unconsciously search, longing for this unity, for this satisfaction, but they find it not in the symbolic pantry, not to be satisfied by comforts and cake flour.

hope that's cohesive :)