South of North Parts III & IV of IV

8/4/2019 South of North Parts III & IV of IV

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/south-of-north-parts-iii-iv-of-iv 1/12

south of north: poems 2002-2004By Angie T. Jeffreys

originally approved in earlier form as a departmental honors thesis at Hollins University 2004

Parts III& IV of IV

III. seasonal hitchhike

tracing the blue ridge parkway

Traveling home, I ride highways like

a sailboat: wind catches car through open

window, pushing hard against opposite side.

drive into asphalt hard

against leveled grooves. Soft rock

poured hot into mountain. Backward in jet stream trees

away from road as leaves drop like road flares, fall

dismantles into winter.

Pavement overcast under skid marks mapping

road by curves of thick rubber deposits that

bisect double-yellow lines. I wonder if layers of tire

left behind stopped after second-guessings - if I want to stop

following ghost paths that eclipse into shadows.

Car snagged mid-current, and I fight

alignment gravitating into mountain wall.

I want to make contact, dream against

earth dyed brown by red clay, roll onto grass

between cracks: decompose into shattered windshield

as it biodegrades in shiny friction

for cars that stop for a view off



seasonal hitchhike

in summer downpoured hurricane

air conditioner stopped pumping

through house, neighborhood

blacked out another night or so

I stand with thumb in road

for a ride to open windows, sheets

of rain pour in the house

my ankles in the middle of the street

inches of water dirty-roll from uphill,

room temperature by

asphalt absorbed heat

but I can't see raindrops smack my face, I look up at stings in eyes

hot alcohol inside the house

condensates on ceiling walls

soggy with vents clogged

as my thumb reaches the streets,

it points at dead-ends hidden

inside the courts

encounter with dusty footprintsI recall your voice carrying the minor chords

a soft tenor in the battlefield of high school choir and

gangling pitches - you at the piano keys, rescuing

I'm here and you're there. I'm standing

on a sidewalk, splintering beneath my toes,

above the ground saturated

with water. Rain accumulates

through the hole in my soggy shoe. I stop to contemplate

the bloated earthworm that's crossed my path, swollenon broken pavement. I think of it wriggling

from the pressure of your foot.

Or tomorrow, when crisped by bright spring heat,

brittle under the weight of your

foot after it blocks the sun, a gray shadow shrinking

on the pavement, a fine dust tracking behind the prints.



You were standing at the top of your broken heart as it splintered

and slowly ran dry. Brittle under the pressure of your rubber soul.

I thought it was mud staining the bottom of your shoe.

Things disintegrate. Things explode.

kissing spiderwebs goodnight

Web and sweat stick to arm and lower lip,

lightning bugs, mosquitoes push wings into freshly

mowed night that leaves a heavy coating on my throat.

It's summer in North Carolina, and I'm just trying

to walk to my front porch from the air-conditioned car.

I'm stuck between the two -

a Magnolia tree and brick stairs

for a kiss I didn't appreciate. I think of you

like I think of humidity,

I wipe you and web off my arms, try to pass off

a bead of sweat as a tear. I mark your face

with a fingerprint before closing the door.

weeding harvests before winter

hands dug into soil down

knees cracked unravel

roots with fingers dangling

broken boned from hand

thick clumps of black earth

gray falls from strings tangled

away from upper layers

last season overturned again

I don't fall through October-paled

skies hands pressed to ground

on dirt melted frost, breath

hot above the soil.



collecting behind glass

You saved the first bottle of beer

I shared with you, pocketing it from the

wood-papered bar that would serve me underage.

I saw you do it, it's on your bedside table. Accumulating with souvenirs -

you didn't even rinse it out,

and it will be a year in June.

We stayed up the night watching morning

mold in white patches onto sky,

your face is green at dawn.

Behind that bottle, a photo of you and I distorts through

residue that resembles sweat accumulating on cold glass

during sticky nights between fingers.

The white patches are growing bright now

inside the bottom of the rim, they

remind me of trapping lightning bugs:

the first time I didn't know to put holes in the lid.

Pet lightning bugs do not make good mementos

of summer nights, and you think that spreading

mold in an empty bottle isn't somehow symbolic.

white sleeve smile

I could hear myself in another language

with incorrectly pronounced Italian names

cooks snickering behind the line

tables greeted with bright tomato sauce, red

wine clotted on my starched white sleeve smile

I tried to muffle my truckstop accent behind

greasy sweat and apron strings wound tootight around my waist.

I was perfectly executed wine presentations

and the number of pens I could carry in my

pockets. I was the breadcrumbs, hard-wiped

from between seats



I was broken bits of a wine glass retrieved

to the beat of the top 40 belted in broken

English after the close.

This summer, I sliced my fingers instead

of lemons in perfect wedges, I carried water only slightly blushed.

IV. astronomy of body: poems for Nicholas de la Caille

physics of the antigravity

I would like to ignore the gravity of people,

just see you in 2-dimensions, shaded againstpage. You do this, record that masses cannot

pull against each other the way hurricanes

spin to shore, then fall to stop.

Mathematically construct a world where

nothing pulls against me except the ground.

I move by connecting a dot-illuminated night,

my fingers run through the vortex lined with

silhouettes.

I sleep there in dreams sometimes, thatasymmetric globe by you pulling against

the crevices: arms warped by this unfamiliar

force. mountains behind rain sleep lazily,

they're wrapped around

tools, they circumscribe the hemisphere.

Yet you create formulas that will never be



repeated: you're an empty house,

uninvented with deliberation. You harness

the light you've stolen from mirror reflections,

and you soldered stars into tools and

fairytale-scientifics, behind the sun risen in front of sky.

horologium: a poem in four parts

I. the ancient Greek

Dividing 12 segments of sunlight into equal parts

sun pressed firm against shadows until

hours lie flat like paper rubbings copied carbon

over the bronze sundial in the back yard.

Notches optically alluded onto

fresh turf or patio, hours intangibly fall

and shift into spaces between reflected heat

steamed up from soil or concrete patio, grayed.

I held the sundial blackened green, the shadows blue

and I was a solitary pole, 6, creating my own notches

pressed against the rough cement, rocks skinning my knees as I rotated around myself like the hands of a watch.

II. ignore the night

The night lies unmarked by hours: I wait

in back yard shadows falling onto sundial

between patio floodlights. I invent one mark of an hour

with the lightswitch by the door, try to mimic the first 12,

count for worn grooves melted away by sunlight

on it's face, but now it's only smooth and dry to touch.

The earth horologium, the night sky one hour

webbed over cement and patio furniture colors.

A streetlight burns it's way through, notching

the ground with thick pools. I stand perpendicular



with the persistence of an insomniac behind daylight

tracing shadows between shadows with my fingers.

III. Huygens pendulum

Inside the house, a pendulum marks perfect time pristine

slashing with shadows that bisect ground and overhead light

stain the floor like charcoal smudging prints along

the oriental rug continually contracting into themselves,

absorb into fibers synthesized, reemerging 60 times again.

I ignore the bar and let my eyes swing in shifting rhythms

with perpetual slices into light that beats onto surfaces

reflecting off, and I listen to hours in cyclical repetition

starting at some unknown point in the room that extendsinto corners. Inside I catalogue hours into night

with recycled increments, and I'm lulled to sleep by ticks

of spring and fall equinox again as they eclipse my carpet.

IV. constellation horologium

Between his finger and the stars la Caille drew onto

space, marking shifting lines that move with precision

navigated through metallic moons, divided

the sky with quadrants and mythological stick figures

he reclaimed etchings, notched Huygens

pendulum with the smudge of his finger

over his telescopic eyepiece. He stayed inside

the shadows marking the hours by movements of stars.

I watch the night sky for a swinging arm, anything

to mark the passage of time as I wade through black grass

and occasional periods of artificial lights.

hand carvings in Mensa

Today, I found two handprints

while sand-digging beneath earth layers:



one fossilized by the rhythmic ocean,

the other mirrored from a point

miles above sea level, not as far from

the sky with lines raised like feathers

running across the palm-shaped hole.

I found fingers next, placing mine inside

yours, rock into mud again from the

heat of the sun or the friction of my hand,

and I am holding on to yours again or first

I can't remember anymore. Your hands were

large enough to blot out the day behind one

convex palm and press fingers together intogaps that disappear with the beach before sunset.

At night, you liked to stand so close to the sky

and the cold rock that frigidly reflects the sunlight.

I want to look for prints in the moon or just palm

lines traced between the stars, but it's the sun

that rises too early, sets too late for images to

harden in the absence of sun heat. Instead I

look for hemispheres intersecting in the ground

as you flex open and shut the center of your hand.

Argo Navis: the journey from

I. Puppis

I can see you in the morning, small between archaic

alphabetic symbols, mapping lines between letters

into words. You're drinking coffee, and periodically lost in black sky reflections solidified within the rim.

Tangled in string, you've webbed yourself into

dead languages, tracing the Aramaic symbols

you've never been able to pronounce in the first place.

Rotating them around each other until they become



a Greek Bible, and you're authoring these new fables

from words intended to betray their own mythology.

Someday, they'll sit stagnant in in later translations pressed

in hotel drawers by the Gideons. You don't know this;

you've got your coffee-black dreams where you renamethose foreign tongues in pictures because there aren't

phonemes in images, only the impression. Rip out

the pages and fold them into sculptures of boats and birds.

You sleep alone on these pages, connecting in solitude

the letters with crucifixes and snakes holding them in.

These are the real stories: the misshapen stars bleeding

ink through the pages.

II. Pyrix You're always logical when it comes to day -

live at night under the atmosphere and humid clouds.

Dream silent in film stills and travel south,

drawing the maps before you sleep at sunrise.

You couldn't deconstruct your father into something

foreign in daylight translations, black and white in

metrical numerics. you wanted to measure the arc

of each bone, to learn him in a more sterile language.

But this isn't the story of your dreams. You don'tduplicate him on the southern sky. Instead, you sail

down, cut through thick earth behind you with

hemispheres and equators that stretch around.

You pass through every season as you reinvent the

globe's dimensions. You're bleeding ships and other

scientific myths out from the otherwise opaque sky,

stars patterned into stories. You never knew you wrote

the Proverbs sailors recite on clear nights, chanting

proper names and angles as prayers for home or a destination.

III. Carina

In nightmares, crack through surface into breast

bone, sift through the charred remnants until

you reach arteries and the heart in oxygen shock.

The lines inside were pre-drawn with folds of wet



muscle, greased fat pocketed shadows, wrapped tight

around the arteries.

So many others, greens turn to gray, and the

shadows disappear in one tone as you try to

keep coloring his sleeping cheeks. Your hot hands caving inthe places where he's already dead. And while atoms cold

fall from fingers you draw imaginary lines, trying to constellate

him in one living piece.

His heart will disperse through limp veins, it'll dangle and

spill over the now rigid inal cord. The dead skin merges with

clean air, and you can't trace perfect circles with a blade

in his chest. But you note that his bile bleeds in geometric

figures with a pivoting scalpel jointed with stars.

IV. Vela so instead you position yourself

so far south of

north, south of

language, false theologies.

Filtered through telescopic views

and mathematical data you

now speak with no nightmares.

I watch in awe as you construct

ships, weave the sails that will carry

the journey fromto search for

south.

You'll populate this new sky with

myths scrawled in celestial

hieroglyphics. Draw yourself

that island, catch the wind that

draws you in to the eye of

any tropical storm.

dreams of sex in other hemispheres

I dream of warm blood, lapsed against mine,

under the sheets with steam and the

things that go with it. I'm printed against

the cotton patterned purple or blue

across the mattress, beneath your breath.



I watch your pear-like eyes, I see black pearls

somewhere south of here, you're foreign in

another hemisphere again. You can't hear me

over your tropical storm: all your nightmares gusting inlandat you, you think from me. I can't brush the wet hair from

your brow. Instead you invent the geometry of us, shapes

pressed in the shadowy fabric. you predict your impact

against the way your leg tangles with my arm. I am your

mathematical equation, my body mapped, manipulated

into graphs. Gravity drips a blurry pen, and I disappear

within the parallax of your closed lids on other coasts.

astronomy of body

Scoring lines into navy soft between lighted

freckles with mythological mathematics,

you calligraphically engraved the sky by night.

I like the way you press your fingers firmly in my skin,

navy blots of sky rub off onto pale stomach. I was

born without birthmarks: you've carved them in.

It's easier to let bone become soft,

melt into fabric, so I land peacefully

against the resistant wall. Joints of your index

finger continually pressing through my right cheek.

Navigating your body onto my stars, I gaze out

at the southern sky as you embed your map in mine:

scrawled lines over a photo of leftover stars, or me;

you say you made me a sculptor's tool.

stars caught in the river

Sun rises over five fingers burning the stars out,

hot light magnified through morning clouds that

hang wet and low. The Moon slides off to the east or

south, and you can't bear to touch my skin hot from day.

I'm not a myth for you to trace anymore.



I'm no goddess pointed with stars cut out from the sky

that somehow subtract the miles between us. You've

only shadowed my face with bruises in the night. I'm not

the sand sculptures you built at noon, eager for sundown.

As you take your hand to shield the light from your eyes,

you leave mine exposed and tell me the story of Phaethon,

slipping into the Greek for the places you don't want me to

understand.

But I know nothing about your mythology or the physics of

stealing stars from water. You say you left his body or mine

burning in the shallow end of the river, flames pooling at

the bank. All you feel is your fingers blistering when their

too close to the sun.

Reticulum

The summer sun falls down behind a hemisphere,

stars stick to night like it's flypaper. I watch them

swarm as I shift my thighs away from the suction

of the plastic lawn chair on Wild Magnolia's patio.

We're outside with the Christmas tree lights

illuminating August, wrapped around the wooden fence.

Loose Blues blow hot on my neck and sweat dried there

about an hour or two margaritas ago. It's open mike indoors

where some people will never truly understand the

growl of a saxophone. the others flail to inaudible melodies.

I recenter by staring up to focus - you said astronomers use

crosshairs of a telescopic lens to locate themselves inside

the netted grid. Tequila green like absinthe reflects away from

you: ice knocks the glass sides, lime juice ferments on my

tongue. I focus

on the dim stars and the salt burning as I recall the crosshairs

I found left behind in an autumn sky as I rename you with her

name. If we look close, we will redraw our tempos on a summer sky.

Documents

South of North Parts III & IV of IV