has left the house with the gust
of a whirl-twirled tumble smack
thud, like a breeze escorting a
door, slammed, to the outside.”
I once wrote a poem that began with these words, and I’ve always loved the above lines because of how they roll off the tongue.
Sometimes I wish that every moment—good and bad—had a perfectly corresponding metaphor (or image) that you could pick up out of the blue and say, “Yes! This is what it is. This explains it exactly.”
On Friday, I discovered one of these perfect metaphors to tell my boss. It was about alien spaceships in the movie Independence Day. Don’t think too hard about that one: you’d have to know the situation to get the connection.
But sometimes no perfectly constructed image exists. Sometimes things just are.
As it turns out, things will continue to be for me for this next year. I had hoped for a change, but fortune did not favor me. It’s funny how profound a sense of loss I feel over something I never had to begin with.
And I’m almost beyond words. Right now, the metaphor I seek has eluded me. Like “she” in Eliot’s “Prufrock,” I seem much less in a position to say, “This is what it is,” but rather, “That is not what I meant at all.”
Guido da Montefeltro (in Dante’s Inferno) reminds me:
S'i' credesse che mia risposta fossePerhaps I have no answers because those who would hear my reply still live in my world.
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria sanza più scosse;
ma però che già mai di questo fondo
non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero,
sanza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
If I thought my reply were meant for
one who ever could return into the world,
this flame would stir no more; and yet, since none—
if what I hear is true—ever returned
alive from this abyss, then without fear
of facing infamy, I answer you. (XXVII, 61-66)
2 comments:
"the metaphor you seek has left the house," etc. is wonderful poetry. Sorry you're blue, but you sure describe it well. Know just what you mean.
Ah, but you are greiving something you had, but lost: the hope for the change that you wished for. The grief is no less real (or understandable) because the loss was intangible, and invisible to anyone but you. In some ways, I think it's harder than grieving the loss of a person. I am promised I'll be reunited with the dear ones who have left time. But I am not promised a reunion with departed hopes. In spite of other promises, which I believe and in which I take comfort and which I have seen come true in my life, there is grief. I pray with you; if I can do anything else to help, please let me know.
P.S. I must send you Ogden Nash's take on Metaphor, when I can find it. Rather different from yours, but I think you'll enjoy it.
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