If we all could be projective and accurate, the world might be perfect, for each of us. But, risk and irony abound, perhaps as a blessing, to make life unpredictable, frustrating our ability to be in control and to know it all.
Failure and disappointment force us to adjust our attitudes and strategies. The danger lies in becoming manipulative and egocentric, as we reset our aims and the means of accomplishing them. The reward can result in our becoming better people because of the experience, opening our lives to compromise, self-sacrifice, and unconditional love.
Too often we are hurt because our projections are idyllic and fail to include variables beyond our control, and sometimes our understanding. The most common oversight usually involves the volition of others, which seems as unpredictable as a political contest.
Just when we count on a person to be who they’ve always been, they appear to change. Usually the unexpected actions of others have little to do with us as causes. The alienation of two people at times is so subtle that neither is aware of the change, until it becomes too late to make any effective adjustment.
Daniel A. Armstrong’s prize winning poem in The Reader’s Café annual adult competition broaches the paradox of “contrast within apparent harmony.”
Olives, Bread and Wine
We ate olives, bread
With the bottles we mass-murdered
Olives and bread, your lips
The taste, the wine.You, who fell from my sky
Into my lap
Ever the muse
And catty.You toasted asagio bread
I pulled the cork
We learned each other’s
Topology with noisy Braille
Kisses between nips and sips
Of another dead magnum.You then killed yourself
With a lost and dog-eared
Notion, or maybe it was I
Who died
So you could run back
To your Mediterranean
Moon, and pale mornings.The matter not, just the
Taste and texture
Of olives and bread
Keeps me glancing
Towards the door that
Stays open, and the
Wistful corkscrew.
- Daniel Armstrong
The first hint that the speaker in the poem has been blindsided comes from the use of past tense throughout all but the last stanza. This use of past tense hints that the experience revealed lingers as a memory, something which cannot be changed by the poem’s conclusion.
The use of the present tense in the final stanza reveals that the speaker will remain sated by memory, until a time when all might be enacted again, a kind of desperate, hopefully romantic notion only a jilted lover can conjure. The “wistful corkscrew” is a strong image that is summative in what the speaker has been reduced to, an object whose sole function is to begin the treacherous affair of imbibing wine, and love, once again.
The very title with its central images of bread, wine, and olives suggests a relationship that is steeped in antiquity as the nomadic, mid-eastern diet seems to indicate. Here also, on a whole other level with its occasional, violent imagery, the poem invites the audience to wonder whether interaction centers around two countries, mid-east and west. Perhaps they formerly wooed one another but are now left in a state of separation with the west hoping beyond hope that the relationship can pick up where it left off.
Also suggestive is the curious commingling of Last Supper images of Mt. Olivet, or Gethsemani, and the sacrificial bread and wine. Recall also that during this famous meal, betrayal and abandonment were mentioned among images and words of eternal hope.
Whether the poet intends all this mixture of secular and religious imagery is irrelevant. The fact is that the symbols are well versed in tradition and most probably picked for their strong ties to sacrifice, as the speaker seems to feel his relationship has become. Will their love be resurrected?
Will their world be saved?