Holy Clover Patches, Toads in Flight

sorry just vomiting up some more poetry before Poetry month ends.  I have actually finished the Bell Jar, and I'm trying to work out my next entry.  In the mean time, food for thought.  ew.

Holy Clover Patches, Toads in Flight

Knock me down, face in grass: it’s a game that you win when I

chew up clover, a cow or a stupid child too close to the ground,

eating with eyes phantom fourth leaves through the patches.

Face full of half eaten beds, ants swarm like moths from closets 

of evening gowns, tear through, clip wings green hearts to fold:

paper eyelets creases unfold to unveil banks: green construction

paper snowflakes dangled from stems like windsocks, the inaudible 

slaps of streamers whistling like a lute played by a musician

in another field with reeds and things that whistle at all:

maybe a field blowing through it’s reed like Pan for his audience

but he plays a lute we cannot hear, not from here.  It’s just

a game you win you exclaim.  But you make me eat these

species endangered til they’re extinct.  No two snowflakes are

the same.  You remind me that it’s just a game you win when we

play.  But blades wheel through to de-cauterize the stems like

cutting open veins, bleeding snowflakes green in through the

green grass accumulating quickly around the ground.  It covers

the roads last, like it almost always does down South.  Leaves

cut like paper-damsels in distress strapped to the railroad 

tracks, slaughtered by dozens by lawnmower teeth or my own.

Knock me down again: I bob for dirt like apples, hands behind

my back, anything but the clovers, no more clovers.  I bite

down bumps and slime.  I got this.  The bulge heaved and shrunk

behind my wrenched lips: you don’t see the green slime rolling

down my chin.  I quietly roll toad around in my mouth, like a 

jaw breaker or even a spearmint TicTac.  Toad did not grow into

prince, charming or not.  Always the vaguest metamorphosis for

the prince who might just have a great personality.  In other

words.  He’s fat.  Now chewing at you, my mouth open wide, I

gargle, why don’t you have a shot?

Hock my toad up at you like paintball from a gun.  You’re out! 

I say that I beat you, after scraping my tongue across a muddy sleeve.

by Angie T. Jeffreys, April 2012

To Darwinism or Fowl Death

One of these days I will write in paragraphs again.  I have so much to say about the Bell Jar, whether or not anyone cares to read it, or this, but I don't want you to think I'm totally shirking on the intent of this blog.  Between moving into my own actual home, dealing with multiple deaths in the family, severing ties with most other family members and finally the suicide of my childhood best friend, it's all I can do these days to just write a poem a day, if that, which I have not been doing as religiously as I'd have liked.  So, here's another poetry month poem - quick and dirty, just how I wrote it.

To Darwinism or Fowl Death

an April showering of poetry by Angie. T. Jeffreys 2012

     Winter fingers gnarled green

vines blue feel like frozen lamp

     posts: I know better than to

swipe it with my tongue these weird

days, the winter fingers entwine with

      spring’s hot and gusty clasp:

     today, the cold hands cup

humid sweat like an ice sculpture

freezing in stone winter’s palm

lines and fingerprints into a red

               and dusty bird feeder

or when the temperature rises

     about another month or so.  Spring

waits for the sun bubble, floating beneath

the glassy window to bounce up like

 a basketball through the frozen water, 

rust so the birds can bathe and drink.

         The metal more brittle than ice spread

across the bird bath dish.  The brown

          birds are only wearing rust like

dried blood to hide their iron silhouettes. 

The cardinals all

fly straight into the window of

metallic ice, bleeding rouge now

or whichever color a bird’s

small brain turns as it bleeds out.  

They spank their heads to smithereens 

just because a cold wind blew today 

in April.  The shallow pool

freezing in swirls of pink like

old fashioned lollypops.  Still,

don’t lick the ice: you might get

stuck: the bird brain laughs like an

Rorschach Test skimming the top ice.  

This is Indian Winter, or the White 

Man’s Winter: swearing on mothers’ 

souls it can’t get worse than it keeps 

getting.  April’s birds  that dive from 

skies like pelicans, a free fall into

not what this bird bath felt like 

this time last year; warm and bodies

their brains in tact.  Statistically, the 

      survival rate’s only thing changed, 

numerically.  I could stop and take a

     photograph of cadavers splattered 

against smooth ice rock.  My masterpiece’d 

be titled: To Darwinism or Fowl Deaths.

and another poem

Mementos You've Kept of Me

Lift up squares of peaches 

fuzz peach cream skin like 

plots of land rescued by airlift 

or sodded grass laid down by 

the help resurrected by your 

naked hands  Take away just 

one dimension take your pick 

and this cube it’s still a part of me  

The circle its missing piece in 

reflective surfaces I see my face 

the hole collapsed withdrawn 

from feasts of light until you brought 

me through science fiction-ish 

laboratories  You look at me 

as though I am a dream-sickle

petit-fore under the bell jar 

on display the deafening dome 

that mutes me like a horn  I sound 

like ghosts of land lines, time-zones 

like long distance telephone calls

by Angie T. Jeffreys

April 2012

yep, it's another poem, because I didn't have time to write an actual blog entry today.

Fulcrums stitched out of clocks

It’s time to begin to sew winter quilts,

select the fabric, quenches racing thoughts that

frictionally warm our panicked brains, just 

but only for the winters.  Stitch the

wounds the doctors say, swallow these pills to stunt

a heart beat slow.  Buy buy a security blanket:

put it on a wish list, or build yourself a quilt, April

is the time to snatch fabric in case you wish to

give it away in December again. In spring children

lose and win the losses of baseball fields of virginity,

on blankets or just read books about it across lawn

chairs in a bright sun.  But the days still slowly stub

away like cigarettes in a heavy glass ashtray.  A quilt

for comfort, it needs to grow the way perennials

and annuals do.  Begin your own quilt when

the frosts end, not as it begins.  But the materials

stand flabbergasted in the fabric stores.  Silk will

rot if this quilt outlives me, cotton shrinks and

warps my seams.  Fascinated I read about a

quilt made of fulcrums for patches, fulcrums

for down, liquified into gold colored threads to

put it all together again.  I hunt and gather through

Craigslist, my great Uncle Edgar’s clicking

clock collection, silent for at least 50 years.

There’s always E-bay in a pinch.  I’m not

positive that fulcrums ever move, alone.

I am not afraid of fulcrum piles on top of me:

They begin as cold, but then like clockwork,

they cradle my heart that shadow boxes nightly

like a pendulum off kilter in the dark.

by Angie T. Jeffreys

April, 2012

the blog isn't dead

I feel like such a poetry month, and blogging failure, right at this second.  I was so pumped about moving and having this place of my own to write tons, but moving, itself, nesting, even decorating becomes like a full time job.  I mean this isn't just a temporary abode, for now, it's home.

I am still plowing through the Bell Jar, well, puttering through, and I imagine in my next post, I'll be sharing something along the lines of what I would have wanted to write a paper about if I were reading this book in high school or college: foiling/paralleling the TB clinic with the electroshock clinic, and other fun musings.

For now, not because I think it's any good, but I'm posting a poem I wrote yesterday while at work, just to show that my brain still resides outside of its box, even when I'm "on the clock" with the kids.

days to dust


Days of days I dust minutes for
new fingerprints, the labyrinths


that only decode in forensic
violence or to the reader of not


just the palms, but she counts
your tips like planets orbiting


round you like moons, inescapable
they cling, drumming fingernails


across the knee tops, impatient
they wind round bones and some


ligaments, muscle dreams and
strings.  Magnets and gravity,


powerless to reverse their
attachments to you - all of


their fields cannot grow any cure
for this disease.  My fingers


bleed off my hands like wind
chimes float on lifeless days hot


strung up pink skinned to my
shoulders again.  Everyday I dust:
they only change directions.

by Angie T. Jeffreys 2012

what bell jar?

     As I've continued on my second read through The Bell Jar, probably against the keen advice of my therapist, I have been trying to do what I've always done when I feel close to a subject matter, like some of the experiences Esther is beginning to have in the latter half of the novel: linguistic scrutiny.  I try and challenge or fit in my own brain the word choices and orderings of the narrator.  I ask myself things like, would I have tossed so many metaphorical corpses and pickled fetuses into a "fictional" novel if I, as the narrator, or even more so, the author, weren't already so preoccupied with the subject of death outside of my writing?  Would I think the time my character saw full grown cadavers, and then the dead babies in a lab of all different sizes, the most significant illustration of what I want to communicate to my reader?  Would I foil that with the immediate transition to watching a baby being born?   And, when she talks about the babies in "bottles," who is she identifying with?  The parent who lost a child who is now on display?  Or, because I can't see my own future anymore, am I the dead baby?
     This could be a dangerous narrative, for the untrained eye, or the very experienced untrained eye, or the officially untrained eye: Plath does what every great writer of fiction does, shows you a scribbled illustration of a place you can't actually see.  We can't question Plath's authority on depression, or mental illness, because no one actually lives to tell about it, or maybe they didn't back then.  And while a lot of people find her prose narrative style to be a bit sour or alarming, I find that with nothing else to weigh up against the story, it would have to be true.  All I have to work with (to disregard the author's biography) is the story, and then the words used to make it up.  And I have to remind myself, that Sylvia Plath probably expected things to get better: this book wasn't her suicide note.  She was after something when she wrote it, but all I can decipher is (theoretically) counting the number of times she references death, and under what circumstances does it occur to her narrator's train of thought.
     It actually took me 133 pages to find my proof that she is baiting us with such a creatively articulate narrator in Esther, and then proving herself to be unreliable in the process, Esther, that is.  First of all, it is in the midst of a scene where Esther has taken on a fake alias, "Elly Higginbottom," for no apparent reason, besides her own paranoia.  Then it's not in the dialogue, it's in the narrator's thoughts and assumptions, as they are reported, that the fallacy is brought to light.  In one moment, she is relentlessly flirting with a sailor in Boston, and then she flips out, because she is afraid that her boyfriend's mother is walking close-by.  The sentence states, "From the distance, I couldn't make out any features on the dime-sized face, but I knew it was Mrs. Willard."  I have to confess, I felt a little betrayed by Plath, here, as 9 times out of 10, when someone uses the past tense when confirming a hunch, it's because he/she knew he/she was already right.  And thus far, Esther hasn't said or done anything too crazy, at least, on page.
     So here is Elly, and the reader, hearts racing together as Mrs. Willard approaches, and suddenly, after this spectacle, Plath just writes, "The woman approached and passed by without a look or a nod, and of course it wasn't Mrs. Willard."
     WTF?!  That's a setup, right?  So for the past day or so, I've been going Back through the Bell Jar, looking for more instances like this, where she linguistically creates a "confessional" narrative that is actually just as finely crafted as the most rigid and constipated fictional narrative that we normally encounter, but no, up to this point, everything else, I can buy, except the morbid imagery that prevails through mundane descriptions.  Plath is fucking with us.  This really isn't confessional at all: she's set a trap for the voyeuristic reader who would approach her novel from the get-go.
     That is called proof of intent.  Unless that was Ted's editing, posthumously.  Then I guess he did it, but I bet it was her.  It wasn't a simple typo, she drew that out for a whole conversation.
     And then, I did start to ask myself, what can a poet bring to her own picture of what a novel is and does?  Implications.  Subliminal messages.  
     Throughout the book, Esther's life is getting messier and messier, and those in the novel who we would expect to swoop in and rescue her, help her bandage only the paper-cuts, while some other invisible part of herself is bleeding out for good.  Do they choose not to see the signs?  Or did Plath pre-write our current DSM manual for symptoms to check for over time with depression?: insomnia, being messy, inability to picture your future, or at least pursue one thing whole-heartedly, cessation of bathing and most other signs of personal hygiene, thoughts of death or suicide, physical recklessness, and general disregard for one's own personal safety or livelihood.
     I guess, I am sitting here screaming from the outside of my copy of The Bell Jar, 'Doreen! Don't just help her shove the clothes under the bed!  Ask her why she feels she can't just pack a bag like a normal person!"
     And that, reader, is where I am right now in my rereading of The Bell Jar, with the excess of deaths around me, here in the real world.