met-AH-for, like in Il Postino

1. I've been noticing the way we people like to talk up our anger and resentments like tasty little morsels that get only more flavorful with extended chewing. I've been checking out how we go looking for other people to chew with us, much the way we like to share a meal. And I've been trying not to sit down at that table. It's really hard. Or it was at first. We're social animals, pack animals, tribal. Can I still be in your tribe if I don't want to share in the ritual of making a case against the offender of the moment? I didn't want to lose my place in the pack. But the more I do it--or don't do it--the better I get at it. Mind you, the person who's passing the bowl to me doesn't necessarily end the meal when I don't serve myself. Often, she just piles it on herself. And I watch. And listen. And feel hungry. But not for what she's eating. Honestly, how long dare I extend this metaphor? Not another moment.

2. I love a bunch of poems by H. R. Hummer in The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets (out of print, but worth tracking down used at allbookstores.com). They're narrative and often extended metaphors. That anthology was published in 1986. When, some years later, Hummer published an essay called "Against Metaphor," I was so bummed out I didn't read it. Oh, ostrich, I love you, your tail feathers fanned, your webbed feet splayed, your rounded bill buried in the shifting sand.

3. No-metaphor love:

Beagle or Something
By April Bernard

The composer’s name was beagle or something,
one of those Brits who make the world wistful
with chorales and canticles and this piece,
a tone poem or what-have-you,
chimes and strings aswirl, dangerous for one
whose eyelids and sockets have been rashing from tears.
The music occupied the car where
I had parked and then sat, staring at
a tree, a smallish maple,
fire-gold and half-undone by the wind,
shaking in itself,
shocking blue morning sky behind, and also
the trucks and telephones wires and dogs
and children late to school along Orange Street, but
it was the tree that caused an uproar,
it was the tree that caused an uproat,
it was the tree that shook and shed,
aureate as a shaken soul, I remembered
I was surprised to have one—for convenience

I placed it in my chest, the heart being away,
and now it seems the soul has lodged there, shaking,
golden-orange, half-spent but clanging
truer than Beagle music or my forehead pressed
hard on the steering wheel in petition for release.

4. The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. But all language is a pointing finger. Only the absence of language is the moon.

5. Shine.