Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor. —Wallace Stevens

 

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We recognize things, as in poetry, through resemblances.
Through metaphors. 

This way we gather them into wider systems so that they don’t dangle alone.


—Anna Kamienska

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When a poet carries the mind into a context of meanings and then pitches it past those, one knows that marvelous rapture that comes from going past all categories of definition. Here we sense the function of metaphor that allows us to make a journey we could not otherwise make, past all categories of definition.

—Joseph Campbell

Thou Art That

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Our lives, it seems, are a memory 

we had once in another place. 

Or are they its metaphor? 

The trees, if trees they are, seem the same, 

and the creeks do. 

The sunlight blurts its lucidity in the same way, 

And the clouds, if clouds they really are, 

still follow us, 

One after one, as they did in the old sky, in the old place. 

I wanted the metaphor, if metaphor it is, to remain 

always the same one. 

I wanted the hills to be the same, 

And the rivers too, 

especially the old rivers, 

The French Broad and Little Pigeon, the Holston and Tennessee, 

And me beside them, under the stopped clouds and stopped stars. 

I wanted to walk in that metaphor, 

untouched by time's corruption. 

I wanted the memory adamantine, never-changing. 

I wanted the memory amber, 

and me in it,

A figure among its translucent highlights and swirls, 

Mid-stride in its glittery motions. 

Wanted the memory cloud-sharp and river-sharp, 

My place inside it transfiguring, ever-still, 

no wind and no wave.

But memory has no memory. Or metaphor. 

It moves as it wants to move, 

and never measures the distance. 

People have died of thirst in crossing a memory. 

Our lives are summer cotton, it seems, 

and good for a season. 

The wind blows, the rivers run, and waves come to a head. 

Memory's logo is the abyss, and that’s no metaphor. 

—Charles Wright
Transparencies, Scar Tissue

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