The Controlling Metaphor
What She Wanted was my bones. As I gave them to her one at a time she put them in a bag from Saks. As long as I didn’t hesitate she collected scapula and vertebrae with a smile. If I grew reluctant she pouted. Then I would come across with rib cage or pelvis. Eventually I lay in a puddle at her feet, only the boneless penis waving like an anemone. “Look at yourself,” she said. “You’re disgusting.” — Ronald Koertge
We’ve all known people whose expectations we could never satisfy — to whom, no matter how deferential, sacrificing, generous, and solicitous we were, it was never enough. Sometimes it’s a parent whom we can never sufficiently please. Young women often find that the young men they date have a desperate need to dominate and make them feel small and foolish. And of course there are women who manage to do the same thing to the men they are with. Koertge has found a pointed and funny way of describing such a relationship. It is not that there are metaphors within Koertge’s poem about a domineering and emasculating woman: rather, the entire poem is a metaphor, much the way a fable or parable can be said to function metaphorically — the story expressing some greater truth about our lives or the world around us. In ordinary conversation one could imagine someone saying: “She wanted everything I had, my money, my dignity, my pride… she would have yanked my bones right out of my flesh if she could have gotten them!” It is as an extension of that sort of metaphoric discourse that Koertge’s poem functions.
Here’s another poem that works on the same principle, creating a little dreamlike fantasy in order to explore human relationships — in this case the relationship between husbands and their abandoned wives:
The Divorcing Men Their wives are these heart-shaped metallic balloons that got loose and bobbed up high over the jammed intersection where the divorcing men sit at the wheel with a bumper at either end. The hearts glint like a second prize, are seamed at the sides, with deep creases of vexation and a string for holding, except who has arms that long anymore? — Suzanne Lummis
How dreamlike these images are — or rather, how much like a disquieting nightmare: the wives transformed into heart-shaped balloons over the jammed intersection, anchored only by strings that their errant husbands cannot — or will not — reach up to hold. The image of the husbands in their cars “with a bumper at either end” is emblematic of people stuck in a world of spiritual gridlock. And the anguish of that final image, those arms of the husbands not being long enough, represents perfectly the anxiety of relationships in which strong commitment is chronically wanting.
Although there are metaphors within the poem — wives as heart-shaped balloons, for example — it can be argued that the entire poem functions as a complex metaphor, exploring, through this little fantasy, the psychologically complex dynamics of contemporary relationships.
Here is another poem that functions as a metaphor, a poem about a character with a penchant for savagery and destructiveness, the sort of person who might be called a she-wolf or man-eater. In the poet’s hands it becomes a grimly humorous horror story:
Untitled she was the perfect woman until he discovered she had a mania for flesh he’d come in late at night, she’d be gnawing away at it under the covers she kept jars of it in the medicine cabinet and when she kept telling him she had a headache he would lay there looking at the ceiling, knowing what she was really doing sometimes she’d snatch a bite in public one day they were visiting mutual friends she dropped her purse and it fell open all that red bloody black flesh on the carpet, it was embarrassing so that night he decided to tell her that it was no good, over, finished and as he mounted the dark stairwell leading to her living quarters he hesitated, but no, he thought, she loves me she had crouched behind the door, and as he walked past, she sprang she stored some of the fresh meat in the drawer by her typewriter she put some chunks of it in the bowl by the bed stand so she could munch on it while she watched tv she wrapped the rest of it carefully in tin foil and stuck it in the freezer ooking into the mirror she let out something like a bark, well, she thought, i never lie to them, i always tell them what i am. they never believe me. — Wanda Coleman
And here is a poem whose protagonist suffers not from savagery but from innocence and trust. It illuminates a kind of personality pattern that is difficult to describe but which most of us will be able to recognize at once:
The Farewell They say the ice will hold so there I go, forced to believe them by my act of trusting people, stepping out on it, and naturally it gaps open and I, forced to carry on coolly by my act of being imperturbable, slide erectly into the water wearing my captain’s helmet, waving to the shore with a sad smile, “Goodbye my darlings, goodbye dear one,” as the ice meets again over my head with a click. — Edward Field
Surely at one time or another we have all been shamed, goaded, or cajoled into doing something that we dreaded doing, putting on a brave smile and acquiescing — simply because we were too trusting or because it would have been socially awkward to have refused. What trouble we have all gotten into at one time or another by our “act of being imperturbable.” Edward Field has managed to embody that ticklish situation in a story at once funny and touching. That sad smile, the absurd captain’s helmet, and the audible click at the end are perfect details and bring the scene and situation vividly to life.
If you have ever wished that some event in your life had never happened, you will understand at once the clever metaphoric use the author of the following poem has made of the amusing spectacle of a film running backwards:
Retreat Before she can deliver the cruncher, I stride away backwards. My car door opens, I fall in as the engine fires. I speed home in reverse, unshave, unshower, plop down in my easy chair where, picturing what a good night it’s going to be, I slowly spit up a manhattan — dry — just the way I like it. — Charles Harper Webb
All the poems we have exhibited thus far in this chapter have been fantasies. But of course incidents in one’s actual life can also be seen as metaphors that illuminate some situation that would be otherwise difficult to describe. The following poem is a straightforward description of an actual event — a child’s first solo bicycle-ride. But the title of the poem tells us that the incident stands for an event currently troubling the narrator’s life:
To a Daughter Leaving Home When I taught you at eight to ride a bicycle, loping along beside you as you wobbled away on two round wheels, my own mouth rounding in surprise when you pulled ahead down the curved path of the park, I kept waiting for the thud of your crash as I sprinted to catch up, while you grew smaller, more breakable with distance, pumping, pumping for your life, screaming with laughter, the hair flapping behind you like a handkerchief waving goodbye. — Linda Pastan
Only that final simile, the child’s hair “flapping behind you like a handkerchief waving goodbye,” and the poem’s title, signal that the incident described in the poem is emblematic of the more painful and complex experience of a daughter leaving home. Here, too, the narrator finds her daughter growing smaller and “more breakable with distance.” Thus the poet has managed to describe her current anxiety through an ostensibly simple memory of her daughter joyfully outdistancing her on a bicycle years before.
Here is a poem that manages, through a brilliantly conceived simile, to describe how the narrator bears the burden of an intolerably heavy grief — the death of his beloved:
Michiko Dead He manages like somebody carrying a box that is too heavy, first with his arms underneath. When their strength gives out, he moves the hands forward, hooking them on the corners, pulling the weight against his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes different muscles take over. Afterward, he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood drains out of the arm that is stretched up to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now the man can hold underneath again, so that he can go on without ever putting the box down. — Jack Gilbert
Poem 14: Reanimating Dead Metaphors
Think of some common figures of speech and how, if taken literally, they might turn into little fantasies. Perhaps the pool in which you are swimming is beginning to boil — a literal embodiment of the figure of speech “to be in hot water.” A poem about finding your tongue tied in knots can become a statement about being — you guessed it — tongue-tied. A poem about parts of your body cracking off can be used to indicate a sense of your life falling apart or coming unglued A poem in which a mask keeps slipping off your face might indicate your unsuccessful attempt to keep up a false front or put on a good face about some unpleasant situation. Similarly, one could write a poem about giving someone the gate (or the axe, or the finger), about eating crow, being torn in two directions, having one’s heart broken, skating on thin ice, sticking one’s foot in one’s mouth, or walking on cloud nine. What would the literal story be of some awkward person who has two left feet, or some woman who has her boyfriend wrapped around her little finger, or some poor dreamer who’s always building castles in the air? Use one of these examples — or one of your own — and, after dreaming up an appropriate story, begin writing a short poem about that person or situation. Be careful not to rely on the comic equation between your story and the maxim to do all the work. The poem will have to be interesting in its own right. Part of the trick of such a poem is to make the symbolic or metaphoric intention perfectly clear without ever having to explicitly tell the reader what you’re trying to say. Linda Pastan doesn’t have to tell us the relationship between her daughter’s leaving home and the memory of her daughter learning to ride a bicycle. Charles Webb doesn’t have to tell us that he’s using the analogy of a film running backwards.
“Curiosity Killed the Cat” The cat creeps forward eyeing the rustling bushes. It takes leaping steps, ready to pounce, but jumping out the bushes, a coyote strikes. The cat falls, chest heaving, as a golden light fills the cat. Green eyes open once more. 8 lives to go. (Drafted 2018)
(Exercise taken from Steve Kowit’s book In the Palm of Your Hand: A Poet’s Portable Workshop)
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