It seems to me that there’s a lot speaking for the interpretation that the man referred to in the first verses are not just any man using women. He is a man preoccupied with something to such an extent that he is desirable to the woman.
If he is ‘Joseph looking for a manger’ and she is the manger, then (metaphorically speaking) the man is about to deliver Christ into this world, while her function is just to be the well… manger. The comforting surrounding to his project.
He is ‘reaching for the sky just to surrender’ — meaning that he is trying to achieve the sublime as a minimum goal for his life. Someone like that cannot truly be accompanied — you cannot hold their hand — they can only be admired from a distance and waited on by people like her, who secretly like the fact that he is preoccupied with something important.
The ‘card that is so high and wild, he’ll never need to deal another’, which he is waiting for is thereby not just another woman — the better woman, who will replace the one he is with now. The card he is waiting for is the fantastic idea. Say, the song to end all songs. The one thing that will define him, so that he’ll never have to try his hand at anything else to have left his mark on the world. It could be a woman he conquers, but not necessarily.
To be led away from this quest for his own ingenuity towards something more cozy infuriates him precisely because he wants to be led away. If he could refuse it at will, he could take it or leave it as and when he wanted it. But if his ‘will is weakened by her love and warmth and shelter’ he is diverted from what he believe to be his true goal.
The fact that he has kept the ‘schedule of trains’ — metaphorically speaking a backdoor — also means that he hasn’t been ready trade in his dreams completely for ‘love and warmth and shelter’. He only wanted it for a while. And if all the men she knew were like this, she probably didn’t want him to trade in his dreams completely.
In the second verse, this is why she hates to see this apparently new man give up — disown his dreams ‘as if they were the burden of some other’. The image of the ‘highway that is curling up like smoke above his shoulder’ is a symbol the vagrant search for the ‘high and wild card’ he has temporarily left behind. Maybe he thinks of the highway as a whiff of smoke easily blown away by a new and better life with her. Maybe it is an image of where his true heart lies. Anyhow, it seems that it is this highway that she enters, when she opens ‘the handle of the road’. They switch roles. She has had enough of being the manger. She wants to be the stranger, now.
This is the reason why the speaker in the poem, using first person for the first time in the text, believes that they might ‘meet between trains’. She has left her shelter and now, instead of him seeking her as a manger (metaphorically speaking a safe haven), she has become like him: an interesting stranger, which other people might be drawn to.
But as strangers, they are not reliable. Their relationship will be romantically coincidental: ‘upon the shore, beneath a bridge…’. And she realizes that it probably will not be at all. She says ‘the bridge or someplace later’, perhaps playing along with the fiction that it will ever happen that two people like that (both reaching for the sky just to surrender, watching for the high and wild card, etc.) will ever have their romantic encounter.
As the song ends with the chorus, she alone again. She is sweeping up jokers, etc., because even embarking on her own path and becoming a stranger herself, did not make him stay. It just made their relationship romantically impossible, rather than a cozy manger, which he could use as long as he liked.
It seems to me that there’s a lot speaking for the interpretation that the man referred to in the first verses are not just any man using women. He is a man preoccupied with something to such an extent that he is desirable to the woman. If he is ‘Joseph looking for a manger’ and she is the manger, then (metaphorically speaking) the man is about to deliver Christ into this world, while her function is just to be the well… manger. The comforting surrounding to his project. He is ‘reaching for the sky just to surrender’ — meaning that he is trying to achieve the sublime as a minimum goal for his life. Someone like that cannot truly be accompanied — you cannot hold their hand — they can only be admired from a distance and waited on by people like her, who secretly like the fact that he is preoccupied with something important. The ‘card that is so high and wild, he’ll never need to deal another’, which he is waiting for is thereby not just another woman — the better woman, who will replace the one he is with now. The card he is waiting for is the fantastic idea. Say, the song to end all songs. The one thing that will define him, so that he’ll never have to try his hand at anything else to have left his mark on the world. It could be a woman he conquers, but not necessarily.
To be led away from this quest for his own ingenuity towards something more cozy infuriates him precisely because he wants to be led away. If he could refuse it at will, he could take it or leave it as and when he wanted it. But if his ‘will is weakened by her love and warmth and shelter’ he is diverted from what he believe to be his true goal. The fact that he has kept the ‘schedule of trains’ — metaphorically speaking a backdoor — also means that he hasn’t been ready trade in his dreams completely for ‘love and warmth and shelter’. He only wanted it for a while. And if all the men she knew were like this, she probably didn’t want him to trade in his dreams completely.
In the second verse, this is why she hates to see this apparently new man give up — disown his dreams ‘as if they were the burden of some other’. The image of the ‘highway that is curling up like smoke above his shoulder’ is a symbol the vagrant search for the ‘high and wild card’ he has temporarily left behind. Maybe he thinks of the highway as a whiff of smoke easily blown away by a new and better life with her. Maybe it is an image of where his true heart lies. Anyhow, it seems that it is this highway that she enters, when she opens ‘the handle of the road’. They switch roles. She has had enough of being the manger. She wants to be the stranger, now.
This is the reason why the speaker in the poem, using first person for the first time in the text, believes that they might ‘meet between trains’. She has left her shelter and now, instead of him seeking her as a manger (metaphorically speaking a safe haven), she has become like him: an interesting stranger, which other people might be drawn to. But as strangers, they are not reliable. Their relationship will be romantically coincidental: ‘upon the shore, beneath a bridge…’. And she realizes that it probably will not be at all. She says ‘the bridge or someplace later’, perhaps playing along with the fiction that it will ever happen that two people like that (both reaching for the sky just to surrender, watching for the high and wild card, etc.) will ever have their romantic encounter.
As the song ends with the chorus, she alone again. She is sweeping up jokers, etc., because even embarking on her own path and becoming a stranger herself, did not make him stay. It just made their relationship romantically impossible, rather than a cozy manger, which he could use as long as he liked.