Speeding Home in Reverse

Ashley Malecha

Published in

Dear Blog

8 min readApr 8, 2023

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.