How to Make a Metaphor

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photo by
s. lee

How to Make a Metaphor

A few minutes later his fire became more spectacular still,

when Sallee, having reached the top of the ridge, looked back

and saw the foreman enter his own fire and lie down in its hot

ashes to let the main fire pass over him.

                                                                                                Norman Maclean

                                                                                                Young Men and Fire

I:

If we don’t spend some time of our day equating

which metaphor relates to us and our living

or not even a metaphor—but the shorter distance

is broader than you think—a simile

or series of similes where like becomes the difference

between a mantra and a desire.  I’ll ask: what would you

rather, if you were sound and uninterrupted,

if you were near to being on fire but didn’t know it:

I’m thinking just now of the Mann Gulch

catastrophe in 1949 and the thirteen men

who died smoke-jumping, alive only two hours

after they fell out of the sky, dying

in denial a fire could save them from the fire

they couldn’t ultimately outclimb. What

were those thirteen, eventually?  All of each

one station of the steps of God on his way

to the cross?  Were they gods, even, or dark 

angels, these each a winged phoenix? Were they like

at times a Yahway, or a Prometheus? having just being

being created or just himself creating his clay man

or men?  I’m not far enough in the story to know

how each guy died, though I know they denied

as straight up crazy their foreman-god lighting a halo

around himself (and he survived) making a fire-

break of his own bones all near to burning

fetal, head tucked up between his knees,

breathing anything but deep.  And aren’t we

all, before we are born, caught, an amniotic

pause, like genuflecting in the dark, pressed against

the placenta, and before the first contraction

announces itself, tightening and narrowing our world

where we’re quite content to stay while above us

the fire and the wind and the sky passes over and over

us because we need to believe we're a marked lintel.   

After Jim Harrison’s “Gathering April”

string of dinghies
isle of shoals

After Jim Harrison’s “Gathering April”

                                …but still we praise

god for whom or which all blessings flow:

that April exists, that a body lays itself

down on a warm cellar door and remembers, drinks

in birds and wind, whiskey,…

                                                the little dooms hiding

in the shadow of each fence post.

                                                               

Going out into the cold morning a little

hung over is like stuffing a crow

call in one ear and an unknown bird’s

in another.  Ok, I stole the crow and the unknown

and maybe the hangover but maybe you won’t

believe me about anything but the birds

or maybe you will.  I’ll say maybe

you’ll believe me when I say I need to

go out in the cold the way Harrison does

(he’s a badass dead guy I’m reading now)

and I don’t know how I ever got along

without him but I have and I will

when I close him up forever like ashes

and specifically the ashes of my friend

who is as close to Harrison as I will ever get

and he’s pretty fucking

close.  I told a living friend the other day about the pistol

my dead friend used

to take to work with him every day, covered

in the lunch box giving his meal an earned

for feeling though no I don’t want to say that

exactly just when I read about men going out loaded

with pistols and women who are not their wives

or daughters and pull the levers

together in succession or all at once that close them

away into their own world of booze and food

and screwing and I’m thinking I could have

been one of those women and loved

it if you know what I mean.  I can connect it

with going chairless into the den:

when the lion swishes his tail and quite leisurely

gets up to sniff and licks his whiskers

with his paw before opening

something (me?  his mouth?) wide enough

to close down slowly whole

on the offering like it was expected all along,

shaved clean, witness to bleak

and not so bleak things, pumping in

the esophagus like a rabbit in the body

of the snake, on its way down into

the viscous and colossal dark.  

On Finding an Old Love Letter

On Finding an Old Love Letter

The occasion came I made myself take very envelope

I’d tucked under the sturdy structure of decades I made

myself open the only one I found of yours I made myself

open it again and tell me from the distance

we stand now here one living and you dead

I didn’t just receive word that would you yes you would

wait for me while I summited the mountain you’d watch

from the bottom of the world and I’d lace the boots

you gave me and tuck those laces and lick the last of you

from my mouth with my tongue and let the wind in

and walk and walk I’d walk the whole range while you waited

and one mountain it wouldn’t be enough while you waited and

so you made me a great stick to take with me the next time

I saw you and I didn’t notice then how weak

the climb had made me and I wanted you to take me

home with you but the mountain…and because I’ve never been much

of a climber – my feet are blind – I let myself go down

like the carriage of my body was made by a cooper

the drying hoops and sinews once new once pliant

to intention I don’t tend to notice what’s cracking what’s brittle

what gulps of altitude I head rush on high and sick

to my stomach and come down hard on the rip-rap

of some last season’s avalanche, on empty bowels, on cliché after

cliché of vultures circling when all along I wanted crows

because by then by the time your letter arrived late and torn

I was on the other side of the world and you’d stopped

watching summits but the letter and I opened it again today

and I wet my lips just in case you were still inside: it

said:     The door’s open

            come in I’ll wait

Roadside Stand, Rt. 101

Roadside Stand, Rt. 101

for  Professor Gillian Osborn, my teacher

Partway through January the beekeeper was dead.

I’d drive by winter

day after winter day seeing

all his brief spaces cave in saying I wish I had

bought some of his honey.  Now

I never can.  All through February

and March I said this and too into April and May.

And the bees in the upper field I imagined them

dormant and chilled and seduced into dying

like their handler falling free after his shut off heart.  Someone

had taped the cold out and I said the moon has gone down on them

completely.  And well past May and early into June I saw all

the bee boxes were gone and the road that led to them had been

filling in with spring, and the road itself was being

remade by the hands of the land again

and the dismissal of man.  It’s deep into August

now.  The beekeeper’s Quonset hut

has been sold at a small roadside auction

and all his tools and deflated snowman for when he sold

Christmas trees and wreathes, maybe an occasional

fruitcake.  And too

his vegetable stand: his corn his squash his early then late

          beans and tomatoes.  All the berries that a simple New

          England town could yield and suffer up after being coaxed

and cajoled by all his bees.  Those occasional

          peaches for the slight of a lesser sun, a hardier, bitter bite.  Nobody

          resurrected it for him.  The field is now nearly completely

          white with Queen Anne’s Lace.  The road is still

filling in.  I watch it tilt itself toward and then finally into the woods and take  to redacting the signs that the seasons

or the children

or the deer may have sent down

          to the ground NO TRESPASSING—CAUTION, BEES—RAW

          HONEY.  and occasionally (because now I know

          he had a sense of humor) LETTUCE TURNIP AND PEA

Cellar

bodhisattva

Cellar

In the fullness of a season someone

had to go first into the other kingdom.

                                               

                                                                Philip Levine

                                                                Burned

Sisyphus lives in my cellar

and he is barefoot, a barefoot God

like Jesus on the cross

was a barefoot God.  Not often

but enough to know he’s there,

there’s shifting maybe in the chimney

maybe in the crates that have been

shiftless for almost twenty years.

I can’t even remember what all is

in them stuff all stuff.  Stuff

I’d wanted to save for one

reason or another.  And lately,

my way of stopping off

memory loss, my way of making

some burned end neuron

sizzle again is to open them, just a flap.

and the age of waiting is enough

to drive me back

just so.  It’s ridiculous

because now it’s taken on

the most of something too long

idle, some of it

has bottom rot and I’ll

consider it gone when I lift it

to my face, my eye and nose

and if it’s anything worth

saving say I meant it all along

just shift it from here

to there from one shelf

one box one shit filled one soaked

through oh  you know don’t you

Sisyphus, living there next to the door

of the chimney how sometimes

heat makes heavy things fall and tink

against the iron door, how rising

is the last edge any of us has

to the actual

letting go, letting it all go once

we’ve decided what goes

to the dump or

up in smoke.  It turns, some of it,

to creosote or cloud or rain

or stains, stains right there,

hold your hands out, see, move

them into the light, black at the heaviest

bit of grip, the meat at the end

of your thumb, smeared then

on the lip when the itch hakes hold

and the shovel is loaded – shoulders

a ship’s sail widening

to gain to the other side

(the spine is my midship)

of the room to pick up what all

whatever the fuck has to be

moved and given up

to rot, to clover, to ash

Old Fashioned

looking back: life mask
abraham lincoln
chesterwood, the berkshires

Old Fashioned

                if you make yourself the envelope

                whose flap of dry glue edge

                is spread opposite the pouch

                and in the pouch the letter

                                and you've invented the letter

                                and the nature of the letter

                                and the length…

                and it’s addressed and it’s stamped

                and the return is bold

                                and if you make yourself

                                the receiver whose tongue

                                is between her

                                lips and those lips are

                                pulled then between the one top

                                and the one bottom  jaw

                                but not before not before no

                                the wet warm meets

                                the dry glue and the glue is brief alive

                                in its intended work

                                and the tongue is sweet

and then it’s pressed

and it’s held

                                                and it’s sent