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.