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Love and Thick Metaphors
with a nod to Gerard Manley Hopkins
i.
if i pull a thick
metaphor
out of a thin
hat, will you bring your ruler?
ii.
measure this:
i slide down the curve of your spine and whisper Silk Smooth Paper
(thickness of metaphor, 385 gsm)
i tap the skin there, press keyboard-button bones
(size of metaphor, Lucida Sans 14 pt, Bold)
and make the word dapple
--i'm about to express how your skin is the sun peeking through the
trees as
seen fragmented on bare geography--
iii.
someone said it's all about contraction; making a smaller simile. For
example:
the long version:
Wait, wait for me, will you? Adventure tells me I have to go. I'll be
back.
Stay. Like An Obedient Pet. Stay. And if you close your heart to all the
others, I'll come back Like A Treat, Like A Fat Chicken Biscuit.
the short version:
Be my Penelope.
iv.
Aristotle didn't speak of thick or thin, just
metafora
--
giving you a name
taken from someone else--
You are my Ted
(as in Hughes, Poet-Man-God; height of metaphor, over 6ft tall),
my Sweet
thing (as in John or chocolate, weight of metaphor, 90 kilos or 250
grams,
respectively).
Diomedes didn't speak of size, either; but of shifting
meaning from proper to improper, for the sake of:
a. beauty (your dappled sunlight smile warms my brow)
b. necessity (i frame you, my dappled-red Picasso, in the tortured
gallery
of my mind)
c. polish (your whisper, dappled promise of early afternoon in the park)
and d. emphasis (the dapple-drawn puzzle of your heart)
v.
sometimes i'll speak metaphors you won't notice, so familiar
by now (you're my Araki bud; my red
my red my red my red my red
rose; will love ever
bloom in the desert of your heart?),
they must have been vivid
once but they've shriveled;
melted fat into thin common bones.
Death does that.
vi.
watch me pull a thick metaphor
out of a thin hat, call me poet
and love me for it.
Aubade
He was up; holding his nightmares
in his right hand and a cigarette in his left.
Coffee? a sneer; she rises on her elbow.
It’s a burden, he says, this coming, this going.
It’s a riddle, she says, I want you more when you’re gone.
In this panic of expulsion, possessing
is what counts. He pushes her flat
once more, adamant to score an imprint
and announces his rapid end
in a repetition of common sentiment.
His doubts corrupt these final lucid
moments before he’s gone
and what she does, goes unseen.
This is his desperate hour.
She can hear him grind his teeth.
It’s history’s fault: his uncle plucked
his eyes out; something about the aunt
on a balcony. It was the first story he shared -
a strategic telling to test her moral opinions,
like grooms once tested for virginity.
She passed it, played horrified. Privately though,
she thought people shouldn’t remove their organs
over just one case of infidelity.
She’s at the door now, ready to farewell
and claim the bed again. He, spitting
a stain off his shoe, says, When I’m gone?
She’d wondered about this moment, turned it dramatic;
Your fears tempt me and I act them true.
Outrageous fortune
…Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?
- Hamlet
her big thing
(before death took her)
was that she closed her house
to chase a lover
and asked to see my tits.
What I remember about that day
just the frounce of her massive cleavage framed
by a shocking red décolleté.
Before that, I’d only ever seen her married --
I would insinuate and she would giggle
about sleeping alone
(her snoring husband, banished
from the bed for practical reasons)
now, late-Forties and single
she wanted sex
and she was so impatient to see me
I want a woman, now
and I was her best friend.
At the same cafe, the one where we'd gossip
every day at coffee break,
she became seducer,
she knocked her knees into mine
and I felt a little frightened child
and held my latte with both hands
while she slid one finger up and down and around her glass
and with the other drew endless circles on her chest
as she spilled her stories about her lover
and the sex, all the sex he showed her.
She would give me multiple choice
and all the choices were correct:
a. a car in the parking lot of a large supermarket chain
b. the public toilets of the National Art Gallery
c. on the steps of the Opera House at 3am on a Tuesday
and
d. a private gathering out in the suburbs –-
a garage turned into a circus of sex
show you acts with high levels of pain and strain
astound you with the use of chains and canes
meet ordinary fathers with little dicks
become Masters of their suburban backyards
see them confine their mates with rope
see them exhibit their mates in cages
see them lock their mates in wooden boxes
offer free finger-poking rights
watch, swap, cut, hang, hurt, spank, plank, obey, lay
Oh, I was buzzing, she said.
She loved all the sex.
I just want to be fucking, she said.
Don’t you?
My sexual preference,
neat and certified by custom and habit.
Only men would seduce me.
I like to shower first.
Scent my flesh.
Hide it under white Egyptian cotton sheets.
Dissolve the light.
Do it without
paraphernalia.
No, I don’t.
I did not raise my shirt for her.
And then.
After months of sex.
It was her head.
Off to the doctor.
Bursting from the inside.
Operate
hold the blood
or it would fill her head
spill
out her eyes
and ears
and
nose.
And then she was a vegetable.
And then she was dead.
And there was no more sex.
And all that fucking
it all
came
to
nothing.
If I had known there'd be an end to it,
I would have granted her my tits.
I would have granted a dying woman’s wish.
© Kathryn Koromilas 2003. All rights reserved.
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