The most significant thing about the poem which she posted on Aug. 13 may well be what she left out.
Even more clever than usual, she used this poem as a vehicle to sum up her life so far, playing with the old phrase “Bakers’ Dozen” to accomplish this.
Bakers Dozen is an English term from medieval times when bakers sold 13 loaves of bread but charged for only 12. This done to keep out of prison.
The King of England at the time was cracking down on bakers who previously routinely ripped off their customers by selling underweight loaves, and those caught faced jail time. Some bakers in order to avoid even an accidental violation of the law began to give the extra loaf.
Although I’m tempted to somehow tie in her previous poem which mentions bakers and loaves of bread, this poem is really more a reflection of her life up until today, a progress report starting at birth and how she did not seem to fit the mold of an ordinary child.
She tended know the game as well as anyone “who’d been there before,” with “eyes side and skeptic-like.”
She was different enough for people to noticed, although they dismissed it as her going through a phase, until time passed and it was, and she lost count, at which point she decided to map out her life in unrelated things to keep track.
Then, we get a very odd phrase when she claimed she once “brought the farm,” something generally associated with sudden death, although some attribute it to payments deceased soldiers’ families received that allowed them to “buy the farm.”
This seems to tie into her next phrase in which she claims to have “twice traded it in,” a common phrase used in business as it if to give up something old or used as a down payment on something new. The two phrases tied together may well mean that she once lived with the oppressive security of a home life that felt like death, and she traded this in on another way of life.
Her reference to three decades of finding herself is easy since she just celebrated her 33rd birthday.
Her four times in love is a bit complex since there is no way of knowing out of all those who shared her life, she considered worthy of love. Does she consider the high school drama teacher who got her a gig at the Apollo? Her husband clearly is one for certain, as most likely the woman she lived with in New York State. And since she announced today (this written a day after her poem was posted) that she has a new lover, is he also one of the four?
In a bit of clever word play, she talks about how five days earlier she was better, but then on the sixth day she was not. (Is this a kind of Biblical reference to creation – which actually took seven days). What exactly transpired on the Sixth day, she doesn’t say.
With a bit more word play, she talks about giving up trying to sleep eight hours at 7 a.m. – although she often complained about being awake at 3 a.m. or 5 a.m. with worry.
She talks about borrowing from the tenth cat she owned one of its nine lives, a rebirth of sorts.
At this point, we get a gap in her numeric sequence, leaving out 11 to leap directly to midnight which is the hour Cinderella had to be back before her coach turned back into a pumpkin and its horses turned back into mice, and she turned back into a house maid rather than a princess, she wishing she could reverse this so she might get all those things at 12 instead.
The remaining loaf – the 13th hour which she describes as her lucky hour – never comes.
So, what happened to number 11? Since most of the numeric references in the concluding portions of the poem deal with time, we can assume it is the 11th hour she skipped.
She is too good a poet to have overlooked this and so the absence must be intentional. But why?
The 11th hour has three significant meanings – the oldest coming out of the Bible which refers to a worker who shows up at the 11th hour and expects to get paid for all 12 hours of work.
The second reference deals with the concept of running out of time to accomplish something before it is too late.
The most modern reference comes out of the conclusion of World War I when the armistice was signed bringing peace to Europe after several years of horrible war.
Of course, she may have left it out for no reason at all. But I suspect she did so deliberately, the question remains as to why.
After many additional readings, other aspects of the poem emerge that seem to better define the underlying message she is trying to convey.
As with many of her poems, this one is written in third person, apparently about herself, summing up her life so far. The speaker is passing judgement on the person she writes about, a supposedly wiser and street-smart person than she was, seeing this other person as having made mistake she should not have made.
Although she is speaking to herself – a gullible foolish self that keeps making the same mistakes, she still naively hopes for the best. The poem is also conveying to others who she is and who she should be.
She appears to be writing the poem due to some set back in her current situation, “Five days it was better, on the sixth it’s not.”
Since I’ve been out of her life for many weeks, I’m assuming this has nothing to do with me – again, this comes at a time when she’s just started a new relationship.
Although only alluded to, the poem seems to be set early in the morning hours when she is struggling to find sleep, giving up on it, hoping for rescue at midnight by some prince holding a glass slipper.
The setting is most likely her apartment. She is restless. And it is easy to picture her seated in her kitchen window smoking a cigarette as she stares out at the world below.
She seems to want to get things to add up in her head and apparently can’t (which may also explain the missing 11th hour). She is reflecting on how she reached this point in her life and holding out for something that never comes.
For all of what she has done, she seems to come back to the same dismal place (as reflected in an earlier poem). By using numbers to reflect each aspect of her life, she creates a tone that sums up everything, even when it doesn’t really add up.
She starts out trying to explain where it all began and how she got into the situation she’s in “with eyes wide and skeptic like,” meaning she has seen it all before and though she was being careful – after all she “knew the game.”
She pulls back and quotes something some elder must have said about perhaps her first relationship, “a phase” she would grow out of, but then repeated again and again until she can’t remember how it occurred and relies on other things to help her “keep on track” – a curious phrase suggesting less an accounting of, but steering her life in some direction, not deviating from some predetermined purpose.
“Buying the farm” appears to mean marriage, something she did only once. But what she means by trading it in twice may have to do with her musical career and her giving her husband a second chance to make good before giving it up altogether.
With her 33rd birthday just behind her, she realizes she has spent her life looking to find herself and what she wants.
Again, we come to the mysterious phrase of for five days she felt better, but on the sixth day not. It is difficult to know precisely what happened.
Since I already noticed the change that occurs with her personality when she gets home from work, it’s easy to believe that she means 7 p.m. is the time when she realizes she’s not going to have an easy time getting to sleep. It is also a time when she starts to drink.
Borrowing one of her cat’s nine lives may well suggest the comfort she gets hunkering down with them against the lonely hours ahead, and the hope that she might escape the loneliness in some fairytale, or perhaps in the bewitching 13th hour she always sees as lucky.
Her use of terms “skeptic like” and “Knowing the game” says that she sees herself as a self-aware, savvy player, who should be tough enough to handle herself in her perpetual search for love in a hostile world of users.
“It’s just a phase,” hints of judgments other people have had about her previous ill choices and how she keeps repeating them. As previously pointed out, she uses “on track,” not “to keep track,” which means she still knows where she wants to get to and won’t let anyone derail her.
By comparing marriage to “buying the farm” she clearly sees marriage as a scam to be avoided, a bad land deal similar to buying a bridge, and has pointed out earlier, this equates to a kind of death. Trading it is, suggests a kind of lemon car deal,” in which she was lucky to have gotten out of it with her fortune still intact.
In borrowing one of the lives from the tenth cat she’s owned, she’s suggested that she’s run out of her own lives, having had more cats to love than people (who have loved her even).
The Cinderella reference suggests just how much of an illusion of finding a prince charming and may be better off as the stepped-on step sister.
The 13th hour line – the witching hour – suggests she may have to rely on her darker side of herself to survive – although even that may not work.
This poem doesn’t rely on a lot of imagery, but the few she supplies are very powerful. She often plays off accepted cliches, pulling reverses to give new meaning to them, often creating oxymorons, such as the innocence of “eyes wide” as compared to the street-smart “skeptic like” and “knew the game,” suggesting she is a wolf like character hidden in sheep like innocence. She knows what is going on around her and yet was still taken in enough to buy the farm, coming out of it wise enough not to make that mistake again.
The imagery of time is more subtle since she starts out in more or less contemporary time when she has already wised up about the world, and then goes back to when elders called her love a phase and then through other relationships, eventually marriage, marching on until she narrows the scope again to a single day, starting at 7 p.m. through to the 13th hour, with only that mysterious 11th hour missing.
But is 11 really missing?
Here perhaps is one of the most brilliant aspects of this poem – how she comes up with 11 – by borrowing one of the nine lives from one of the ten cats she’s owned; she comes up with the number 11.
Ultimately, the poet is asking what exactly has her life added up to?
The paradox in the poem comes near the beginning when she infers innocence of birth and yet compares it to someone who has seen it all before, and yet looking back, as savvy as she was, she still seems to have been taken in – by life and the cruel world.
Over all the poet doesn’t really like what her life has added up to so far, even though it is a life rich with experience.
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