To be perfectly frank, I do not fully understand this poem. I only have my own assumptions, and it seems to be a personal translation and understanding. It almost feels bias, which is why I type my analysis with care and prudence. Reading this poem all I kept returning to was the central idea of a cry for self-actualization, self-discovery.
"I am putting makeup on empty space", painting and camouflaging the "empty space" which I like to think of as the speaker her/himself, and her/his ideal image, or rather, her unique being. As the poem goes on, it seemed like the speaker experimented with many things trying to find their niche, "pasting eyelashes... painting eyebrows... piling creams on empty space". Painting , pasting, and piling on the fantasy dreamt empty space, to fulfill her standards, but to no avail as she continues. "Hanging ornaments... gold clips, lacquer combs, plastic hairpins... sticking wire pins... packing, stuffing jamming empty space". Pasting, sticking, stuffing jamming plastic hairpins, the speaker is relentless in her search for her true self but is found lost and restless in the "hanging night, drifting night, the moaning night, daughter of troubled sleep".
"I am taping the picture I love so well on the wall: moonless black night beyond country-plaid curtains everything illuminated out of empty space", illuminated by her presence, she hangs "up a mirror to catch stars, everything occurs to me out in the night in my skull of empty space". Here the speaker has seemed to contacted her true self, in the midst of the cold night, in the depths of her mind, she is satisfied with herself as is, she is an illuminating gleam of light in the sky. "There's talk of dressing the body with strange adornments to remind you of a vow to empty space there's talk of the discourse in your mind... I wish to venture into a not-chiseled place". Finally satisfied, she realizes the sad social-programmed fabrications of images past.
To save myself from any further possible humiliation, I reserve any other supporting notions for the journal.
Yes, I think you're right on several counts, here--the urge toward self-actualization, how this is often difficult our minds are cluttered with "social-programmed fabrications" (think of Piercy's "Barbie Doll"); though he wouldn't say she is "satisfied" untimately. A sense of the transitoriness of all things, almost a willful arbitrariness (of the self, its image making) "appear" in the poem; what we are left with is the "vow to empty space," underlying it all... The poem is embued with Buddhist sensibility, in this way. In a sense (a very different sense), I think of what follows the "We" each line/time in Brooks "We Real Cool."
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